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Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Dems attack Hegseth to advance a coup against Trump

 by Andrea Widburg

On April 15, thirteen radical House Democrats introduced six articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth, accusing him of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The charges are spurious, alleging that he violated the War Powers Act (which didn’t apply), that he committed war crimes because Iran claimed that girls were in a building on an IRGC base that the U.S. struck, and managing the military in ways they disliked.

Those articles may have been the acts of radicals, but the fact is that the Democrats have relentlessly sought to undermine Pete Hegseth at every turn. Some of it is purely policy-driven: They want mentally ill people in the military, low recruitment, a focus on social justice, not winning wars, and the triumph of overt enemies.

However, DataRepublican has a more shocking contention. She says the continued efforts to destroy Pete Hegseth are the prelude to an actual coup. I particularly noted this because Democrats are engaged in a stealth revolution against our Constitution and the Founders’ vision. DataRepublican, however, a more kinetic coup, which requires disposing of Hegseth.

I’ve pasted DataRepublican’s full thread at the end of this post. This is a summary, with some added information:

Here’s the premise:

Here’s the key point that she develops:

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.

Whoa! But here’s the proof:

It begins with a study from Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan examining 323 regime-change campaigns. It says the obvious: If a leader’s security forces abandon him, he’s 46 times more vulnerable.

Armed with that information, Maria Stephan became the Chief Organizer of the Horizons Project. That organization’s mission is to “Strengthen connections and collective action among US pro-democracy movements and networks.” It is steeped in the language of leftism.

Last summer, Stephan created a training video explaining how to destroy existing institutions. Here’s the key quotation:

The third attribute of successful campaigns, they feature defections and loyalty shifts within key institutional pillars. ... Security forces refused to obey orders to repress protesters.

The same presentation explains that one of the ways to destroy the government is to destroy the loyalty that the military and police forces have to the administration:

Servants are responsible for executing policies and basically getting anything done. Security forces wield coercive power. These pillars and their social, political, and economic power ultimately prop up regimes. And when they crack and power within them shifts, the entire edifice can crumble.

Additionally, Gene Sharp’s message still resonates with this crew.

If you don’t know who Gene Sharp is (I didn’t), here’s the skinny: Sharp, who was a conscientious objector during the Korean War and died at 90 in 2018, created a handbook for non-violent resistance to government, which included 198 suggested methods. Because he allegedly worked with our government to help bring down other governments, the left attacked him—right up until Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn vigorously defended him.

Hardy Merriman, who worked for Sharp and helped write the CANVAS regime-change handbook, created a domestic version that highlights that military members swear an oath to the Constitution, not the president. Keep that point in mind.

Two months after Trump’s November 2024 victory, the august Brookings Institution published its Democracy Playbook 2025. It discusses “dealing with security forces” and looks at color revolution case studies. In a footnote, the playbook explicitly points to an AP article entitled “Pete Hegseth had been flagged by fellow service member as possible ‘Insider Threat.’”

On November 11, 2025, the National Lawyers Guild, a hard-left institution, put together a guidebook for service members wanting to know the finer points of “refusing illegal orders.” One day later, the Guild called the U.S. action in Venezuela a war crime and called for officers to disobey orders.

Then, on November 18, 2025, Mark Kelly and five others published their infamous video telling service members to disobey Trump’s orders. These were not random politicians.

According to DataRepublican, those “five others” were all recruited through the New Politics Leadership Academy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that works to train military veterans, social workers, Peace Corps volunteers, and others to get into politics. The organization says it’s nonpartisan, but its “graduates” are overwhelmingly Democrat.

Just as the playbook predicted, the administration responded harshly to the video. Its efforts to punish them failed, with a grand jury declining to indict anyone. It was a cause célèbres.

Ironically, Democrats have ignored Daniel Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, who has been more rigorous about disrupting the Biden status quo. DataRepublican posits that this is because Driscoll is chummy with many Democrats, or, at least, his wife is. (Leftist wives are often a problem; e.g., the wives of Paul Krugman, Joe Kent, Jake Tapper, Colin Kaepernick, etc.)

Driscoll is also embedded in professional networks, associations that make him vulnerable to defecting from the vision that Trump and Hegseth have for the military (a fighting machine, not a social justice experiment). Hegseth has no loyalty to these professional institutions. He’s loyal only to the military.

There are a few more details DataRepublican provides about organizers out to get Hegseth, but that’s the gist of it. The conclusion is that the key leftist institutions that Hegseth named in DataRepublican’s first tweet knew he was a threat, not to them specifically, but to their plans, and they instantly swung into action to put them into effect.

If getting Republicans on the same page is like herding cats (see, e.g., the failed SAVE America Act, which ~70% of all Americans support), Democrats are like the Borg: They have a single sensibility, and they can and will do whatever it takes to achieve their goal.

Image created using AI.

The tweets


https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/04/dems_attack_hegseth_to_advance_a_coup_against_trump.html

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RFK Jr. Is Doing Well

 There was skepticism when President Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be secretary of Health and Human Services.  He was grilled by Democrats in Congress over his vaccine statements, and there were even Republicans, including Senators Tillis, Murkowski, Cassidy, and McConnell, who questioned the choice.

It’s been just over a year since Kennedy took office, so it’s a good time to ask: How’s he doing?  Compared to his predecessor in HHS — whom no one can name, actually — what has he accomplished so far?

In his short time in office, RFK Jr. has done a lot to save America.  He has directed food manufacturers to remove artificial dyes from their products.  He has overseen the issuance of a revised food pyramid stressing whole foods over processed ones and restoring saturated fat to the diet.  He has revised guidelines for vaccinations that are not based on the science.  He has stepped up studies of chronic childhood disease, and he has ordered unhealthy processed foods to be removed from SNAP and school lunch programs.  He has also proposed reinstating the presidential fitness test in schools, and his MAHA Commission is charged with examining the role of fitness across the board.

Certainly, RFK Jr. is facing an uphill battle in changing America’s lifestyle choices.  A brief tour of any grocery store reveals part of the problem: aisle upon aisle of chips, cookies, sweetened baked goods, overly salted canned goods, and an oversupply of meat and other animal products — far more than our ancestors consumed even fifty years ago.  These choices mirror the habits of consumers.  If the public wanted more soy milk and kale crackers, these items would dominate the aisles, but lifestyle choices take decades to alter.

Sixty years ago, government began educating the public about the cancer risk of smoking.  It took decades, but now smoking has declined from 85% among men in the 1950s to around 20% today, and the incidence of lung cancer has declined along with it, with lung cancer incidence declining between 1990 and 2007 by 15.3% and from 2007 to 2015 by another 25% among males.  But heart disease, diabetes, and other cancers continue to plague America.

What stands out is that it took so long for the public to change its ways.  The first mandatory warnings appeared on cigarette packages exactly sixty years ago.  RFK Jr.’s agenda focuses on banning toxic chemicals in food and food packaging, including PFAS, BPA, BHA, BHT, and industrial solvents; elimination synthetic food dyes; and reducing consumption of processed food.  Along with this, he is promoting organic and whole foods and food from grass-fed and free-range animal products.  Taken together, I believe that these changes would go a long way toward making America healthy again, but so far, Kennedy’s emphasis has been on removing what is toxic and not on adding what is healthy.

Healthy eating is a niche in America, and only that.  Healthy living videos by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and others are popular on YouTube, but the percentage of the population that watches them is infinitesimal.  It’s estimated that McDonald’s alone sells some 2.63 billion hamburgers annually, and that is just one fast food chain.  Frozen prepared food is often not very different from fast food in terms of fat, salt, and sugar content.

Occasionally, politicians have tried to impose food choices on the public, such as when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg limited the size of soft drinks to 16 oz., but always with disappointing results.  The public will not change until it wants to change.

In fact, the consumption of pizza and burgers, and hot dogs and sausage, and luncheon meats and fried foods — and the corresponding lack of consumption of fruits and vegetables, greens, tofu, nuts, and seeds, and the lack of daily exercise — contributes to many of America’s health problems.  There is abundant evidence for this statement.  The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified processed meat as “Group 1: Carcinogenic to Humans.”  The American Diabetes Association recommends eating less processed food and specifically less in refined carbohydrates and less in added sugars.  The American Heart Association offers a succinct guideline for healthy eating that includes eating more nuts and whole grains along with fruits, vegetables, beans, fish, and low-fat dairy and avoiding processed foods.  The information is out there, but it has not yet sunk in. 

Kennedy has also done less to promote exercise than might be expected of a MAHA advocate.  It will take more than a 90-second shirtless video with Kid Rock (which many mocked) to get Americans off the couch.  JFK’s U.S. Physical Fitness Program, headed up by Coach Bud Wilkinson of the University of Oklahoma, set modest goals, such as 15 minutes of physical exercise for all students and testing to track improvement.  In many schools, the program involved much more than 15 minutes, and the results were substantial in the short run, but JFK’s fitness program ended with Kennedy’s death in 1963 and would probably have faded away regardless.

One could argue that some form of fitness program in the schools is far more important today than it was in 1961, when JFK’s program began.  A 2019 article revealed that 27% of potential Army enlistees were too obese or overweight to enlist and that another 47% of men and 59% of women failed the entry-level training test following enlistment.  But nothing the government has done, including the Army’s own attempt to prepare recruits in advance, has made much of a difference.  Obesity rates have doubled over the past 30 years, and they continue to rise.

As always, government programs, however well meaning, cannot alter habits that the public does not want to change.  Tobacco usage declined slowly over decades as the public came to understand tobacco’s relationship with lung cancer and heart disease, but the public made these changes largely on its own.  Government can ban certain toxic chemicals, but essential lifestyle changes have to come from individuals.  Once the public comes to see the dangers of unhealthy habits, it will make the necessary changes, but it will take time.

America is fortunate to have an HHS director who is passionate about making America healthy again.  Some of his actions will have almost immediate benefits, whereas others, such as the Kid Rock video, will have none at all.  What can actually make America healthier is the realization that lifestyle changes may lead to a happier and longer life.  Government can promote that idea, but until it actually sinks in, health changes will be slow to come.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/rfk_jr_is_doing_well.html

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Cal. gov hopeful Becerra under fire for ties to corruption scandal

 Former Health and Human Services chief Xavier Becerra may be surging in the competition for California governor, but his ties to an alleged fraud case are still dogging him.

A longtime aide for Becerra, who’s considered a Democratic frontrunner, pled guilty to charges that he helped illegally funnel campaign cash towards a no-show job for his wife — and the governor hopeful is now facing uncomfortable questions about the bombshell corruption scandal.

Xavier Becerra speaking at a town hall in Los Angeles.
Xavier Becerra.ZUMAPRESS.com

According to the feds, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff Dana Williamson plotted with lobbyist Greg Campbell and longtime Becerra aide Sean McCluskie to siphon $225,000 from Becerra’s dormant campaign account for personal use between February 2022 and September 2024.

While McCluskie was Becerra’s chief of staff, Williamson — who also worked on Becerra’s 2018 campaign for attorney general — allegedly funneled $10,000 per month. The funds were routed through multiple business entities and falsely labeled as pay for a “no-show” job that didn’t exist.

Williamson also faces other charges, and Newsom had said he placed her on leave when made aware of a probe. She pleaded not guilty, while Campbell and McCluskie pleaded guilty.

Becerra has repeatedly denied knowledge of the scheme, and has not been accused of wrongdoing.


But his allies’ alleged misdeeds have put an unflattering spotlight on the longtime California pol.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is also running for governor, blasted Becerra online Wednesday morning for what he called a flip-flop on what Becerra knew around the scandal.

“Same politician. Same illegal payments,” said Villaraigosa, who is also a Democrat. “But five months later
Xavier Becerra tells a different story.”

The former mayor shared two clips, put on repeat and dramatically slowed down, where Becerra tells one television station in November that “I was aware of the payments being made.” Then he tells another journalist in April that “I didn’t oversee that part.”

In the November clip shared by Villaraigosa, Becerra said he “had authorized” the payments when approached by advisors and “saw” the payments.

Dana Williamson, wearing sunglasses, leaves a courthouse while reporters hold microphones toward her.
Dana Williamson, a former top aide to Gov. Gavin Newsom, center, leaves the courthouse.AP

Becerra adviser Michael Bustamante flatly dismissed the attack.

“I’m sure we’re going to see plenty of tweets from Antonio over the next few days as he sits on the couch while the rest of the legitimate candidates are debating on stage,” Bustamante said.

“There is no substance. This is all contrived from a candidate who is probably moments away from exiting,” he added.

A full look at the November interview shows that Becerra said he was misled as to the nature of the payments, which he was told was for account management services. He believed them, he said.

“If you take a look at what campaigns spend, you spend— you have to pay quite a bit of money for compliance purposes, for oversight, for legal fees, for basic management, for filing of your financial disclosure statements, for filing of your tax returns. It’s a lot of activity,” Becerra said.

He was busy working in the Biden administration running the Health and Human Services agency, so “I was told its going to cost us about $10,000— I was told that’s the rate I would have to pay to get someone who could manage that and make sure that I don’t have to worry about it.”

Antonio Villaraigosa speaking at the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce Business Policy Summit.
Antonio Villaraigosa speaks during a gubernatorial candidate forum in Sacramento, Calif.AP

In the new April interview, he clarified he “had no sight on that” as he was busy with HHS. When asked what it says about his judgment to trust McCluskie, he acknowledged, “People make mistakes.”

The California Post reached out to the Becerra campaign for comment.

Becerra had been trailing in the single digits in polls, but after former congressman Eric Swalwell left the race from sexual assault allegations, he has surged to become one of the leading Democrats.

Villaraigosa still polls near the bottom of the field. He is a frequent thorn in Becerra’s side; the former mayor even launched attack ads on Becerra before his rise in the polls.

https://nypost.com/2026/04/22/us-news/xavier-becerra-under-fire-for-ties-to-corruption-scandal/

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