Receipts: This Is How American Leftists Use Color Wars Tactics to Target Pete Hegseth

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By Tim O'Brein

You know the joke about how fast you need to be if a bear is chasing you, don’t you? You don’t have to be faster than the bear; you just need to be faster than the other guy.

To put a finer point on that, if you ever watch those nature documentaries and programs, you notice that the law of the jungle dictates that when a predator is chasing down a herd of prey, the slowest and perhaps the weakest member of the herd becomes the victim. The rest of the herd survives for at least another day.

It’s not much more complicated than that when seeking to understand how the Democrats and the rest of the left are trying to take down Donald Trump and his administration. The law of the jungle, one member at a time. More often than not, the tactical mistake the left continues to make is to go after the strongest members of the administration first, not the weakest one.

They attack the ones they fear most instead of the ones they least fear. It’s why they come up dry so often. That’s how you know that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is someone they fear quite a bit. He’s one of the strongest and seemingly most trusted members in Trump’s cabinet.

No one in understands the law of the jungle as it applies to politics better than Trump. He knows from experience and has the scars to prove it, literally and physically. But he’s also understood the figurative brutality of politics for a long time. He knows what the left is trying to do to his inner circle, and it’s why he smartly doesn’t give the left a scalp every now and then to appease it. Kristi Noem was an outlier and essentially fired herself with her reckless behavior, her incompetence in her job, and the circus her husband brought to the fore.

As for Pam Bondi, Trump did not turn her over to the left. He’s protected her dignity, and presumably he has preserved her loyalty, even though she’s no longer attorney general. Trump is very careful not to appease the left. Instinctively, he knows that the strength of his administration lies in how he can keep it intact so that the left can’t pick off stragglers one by one.

This brings us to one of the more interesting threads you’ll read from DataRepublican (small r) on the X platform. She did a deep dive into the inner workings of color wars and makes a convincing case, with receipts, that illustrates how they are being used against this administration.

She starts with a simple statement that is impossible to argue with: “The true reason Pete Hegseth is being targeted is because he's standing between President Trump and a coup.”

In the video, Hegseth himself points out that the swamp is trying to take him down.

“Trump threatened the international order, Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C., Brookings Institute types…They were never told their wars are stupid, their generals were losers, or that NATO didn’t step up, that China would unleash a virus. So, let’s call it the China virus (and) hold them to account for it. All of those things were the calling out of an international order that was failing, and is continuing to fail,” he said.

If it were just that, we might shrug our shoulders and acknowledge that’s just life in Washington. But DataRepublican touched on something more chilling that might remind you of how you first felt when you realized that in 2020 the people in the shadows actually pulled it off — they actually installed a dementia-ridden shell of a man in the White House in the most opaque of ways — ways in which we could never before have imagined.

"Within 72 hours of his (Hegseth’s) nomination, a color revolution planning document cited him as an insider threat,” she wrote. “They didn't go after him because of drinking. They didn't go after him because of women. They went after him because every color revolution manual ever written says the same thing: you cannot topple a government unless the security forces defect. And a loyal Secretary of Defense is the one person who makes sure they don't."

The first receipt came in the form of a post that puts sunlight on the roles Harvard's Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan have played in conceiving and implementing color war strategies. According to DataRepublican, these are “the two most cited scholars in the color revolution field (who) studied 323 regime change campaigns.”

According to them, “security force defections make non-violent campaigns forty-six times more likely to succeed.” In other words, applying this to Trump, if you want to take him down, you need to start with the military. You need to create divisiveness in the ranks. You need to kill morale. You need to create an environment of competing loyalties. You need to instill dissension in a system that can only function without dissension.

As DataRepublican points out, Stephan is now chief organizer of something called the Horizons Project. To describe itself, its website uses some of the most Orwellian language you’ll find. If you want to understand what it really says you have to think in terms of opposites. Up is down, black is white, and authoritarianism is democracy.

Once you understand this, then you can adequately see where they are coming from when they describe the organization this way: “In times of increasing political violence and rising authoritarianism, diverse movements have come together to block harms and injustice, bridge divides, and build a more inclusive democracy.”

In other words, the people who are inciting so much of the violence — who are trying to frame legitimate democratically elected leaders as authoritarians — these are the ones who are joining forces to create harms and injustice, to create divides, and to destroy democracy through polarization.

Think about the diversity movement. If it was genuinely interested in unity, it would emphasize what we have in common. But instead, it can never let go of its constant need to remind people of what makes them different, especially when they have more in common than not. Divide and conquer.

To help create more divisiveness, Stephan conducted a training on July 16, 2025, where she described how to use “non-violent tactics” to create divisiveness and introduce “loyalty shifts” to disrupt a regime.

This training appears to be for organizers of the “No Kings” astroturf movement. Stephan told her trainees that certain “pillars” prop up a regime through “social, political, and economic power.” Pay attention to that last word, because through all of the euphemistic language used by the left, this sliver of truth is what all of this is about. Power.

In order to take down a regime, you must destroy the pillars. So, what are those pillars? According to Stephan, they are business, labor, faith, education, civil service, and the military or the police.

If you want the power, you need to co-opt all of these, starting with “security forces.”

DataRepublican brought it closer to home when she then captured the essence of the “CANVAS regime change field manual used in 50+ countries.” She said there is a domestic version that says: "’Those who serve in government institutions swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. They don't swear allegiance to the president himself.’ Then it teaches them how to defect: call in sick, work slowly, ignore orders, leak to media, publicly defy.”

When was the last time you saw news stories where federal civil servants – one of those pillars – were encouraged to call in sick to disrupt society?

It gets worse. DataRepublican produced documentation that shows how Hegseth, specifically, has been targeted.

“The ‘Democracy Playbook 2025’ — the same document that teaches ‘dealing with security forces’ and color revolution case studies — cites this in footnote 49: ‘Pete Hegseth had been flagged by fellow service member as possible 'Insider Threat'’ — AP, November 15, 2024. 72 hours after his nomination. In a regime change manual,” DataRepublican wrote.

To reiterate, less than three days after Hegseth was nominated for his cabinet position, a color revolution manual already sought to define Hegseth by framing him as an “Insider Threat.” Total fiction, but with a purpose.

Thanks to an organization called the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) Military Law Task Force, DataRepublican says a color war operation “went live.”

On Nov. 11, 2025, the Guild published an “FAQ on Refusing Illegal Orders.” Out of the blue, the notion of refusing orders became a thing, and appears to have originated here in the most recent context. The next day, the group then published a “statement calling U.S. Venezuela operations ‘war crimes’ and declaring officers ‘should refuse superior orders.’"

This was following the U.S.’s successful operation to extract cartel leader and dictator Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. In the NLG's bizarre framing of reality, this is characterized as a “war crime.” Why? To undermine America’s democratically elected president, who was elected precisely to do this sort of thing.

If you go to this group’s website today, you find that the Guild is expressing solidarity with communist Cuba, and it conducted a related workshop at its convention in Detroit on April 11. Call me crazy, but I don’t think the pathway to democracy is through Cuba. But that's what they are getting people to believe.

Six days after the communist-loving NLG instigated this new “refusing orders” narrative, who comes along but the “Seditious Six,” as they are now known. On Nov. 18, six Democrats in Congress who served in the military are featured in a video that is so well produced with high production values, it makes you wonder how long this operation was in the planning stages. In any event, the script for the video perfectly tracks (on message) with the NLG's content. You can't help but wonder if it was coordinated and how so.

DataRepublican says that five of the six were “recruited through a single organization: New Politics Leadership Academy. One pipeline. One talent program. Five of six. Mark Kelly was the sixth.”

As the Trump administration responded with attacks of their own on this campaign, DataRepublican says a trap had been set, which was designed to make the administration look feckless in the minds of the public and start to create divisiveness from within.

“The administration took the bait. Exactly as the playbook predicted,” she wrote. She pointed out that Hegseth is particularly worrisome for the swamp because he’s not attached to the professional networks that “induce defection.” Other presidential nominees flew through the nomination and approval process because they are part of those networks and can be co-opted. Hegseth “was never attached,” and so the “only option is removal.”

Then DataRepublican dug into some of the intrigue surrounding an organization you likely never heard of called the Inter-Movement Impact Project (IMIP), which is a convener of leftists who seem really interested in social engineering through various means, using propaganda and propagandistic language as a tool.

While Stephan’s Horizons Project provides the strategy for deconstructing democratic and other regimes, IMIP provides a coordination layer. IMIP builds the organizational infrastructure to enable leftist movements to collaborate. Horizons provides the roadmap or blueprint for using “non-violent” action to undermine regimes.

How does all of this manifest itself? DataRepublican pointed to the time when Hegseth went to take his seat on the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) board, and the acting president locked him out and “barricaded the building.” Hegseth had to call in the FBI and Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police to gain access to the building.

If you forget what USIP is, it is one of the many Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) flagged for waste and possible fraud and corruption.

According to DataRepublican, USIP is “the institutional home where the color revolution playbook was developed.”

In the end, DataRepublican detailed how entrenched anti-American institutions were able to demonize the current administration through “pre-positioned oppo research activated in 72 hours — A regime change planning document citing him (Hegseth) by name — A legal predicate for military disobedience published the same week as the Seditious Six video,” among other things, all to undermine the current administration.

These are color war operatives using their talents, not to undermine an overseas dictatorship or communist regime, but rather to target a current presidential administration — to "elicit loyalty shifts" and destroy the country’s democratically elected leadership, one cabinet member at a time.

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