Democrats ‘Reminder’ to Troops is a Political Op, Not a Civics Lesson
“It is, in fact, an effort to undermine the President, to encourage disobedience of his orders, to sow chaos in the ranks, and to promote continued lawfare and turmoil in the military.”
It seemed to come out of nowhere. Although service members are explicitly taught — beginning in basic training and throughout their careers — that they have a duty to refuse unlawful orders, six Democratic lawmakers nonetheless felt it was necessary to produce a video to “remind” them of this fact.
When challenged, Democrats defended the video by asking what could possibly be wrong with telling troops not to follow illegal orders.
Well, other than treating members of the military like children and insinuating that the president of the United States has issued unlawful orders, nothing I suppose.
In reality, the video’s purpose was unmistakable: to sow doubt and breed suspicion of their commanding officers among service members. It was a psyop.
One X user nailed it:
The “Seditious Six” video isn’t some neutral civics reminder; it’s built like the same regime‑change propaganda the U.S. has used overseas. It takes a legal truism everyone agrees with – “don’t follow illegal orders” – then wraps it in ominous music, military credentials, and direct emotional appeals to the troops in a way that’s designed to build distrust in the elected commander‑in‑chief rather than fix any real problem. In other countries, that style of messaging is used to soften up the security forces before a push to weaken or topple a government; recycling that template at home, on American soldiers, is what alarms people who see it as crossing from normal dissent into “color revolution” territory.
The “Seditious Six” video isn’t some neutral civics reminder; it’s built like the same regime‑change propaganda the U.S. has used overseas. It takes a legal truism everyone agrees with – “don’t follow illegal orders” – then wraps it in ominous music, military credentials, and… pic.twitter.com/ZmlM9YfPaX
— Cyborg Bob (@cyborg_bob) November 26, 2025
In a Wednesday op-ed on Substack, John Lucas, a veteran who has served as both an Army Ranger and a Special Forces Green Beret, called the video “rotten nonsense.”
It is an effort to create plausible deniability as a misleading subterfuge. Their slick video production is not an innocent civics lesson for ignorant troops who somehow need additional instruction in military law. It is, in fact, an effort to undermine the President, to encourage disobedience of his orders, to sow chaos in the ranks, and to promote continued lawfare and turmoil in the military, all of which is intended to hamstring this President because they disagree with his policies.
Lucas noted that, were these lawmakers genuinely concerned that service members needed to be reminded of the laws surrounding unlawful orders, they had “a viable and proper alternative.”
They could have approached the Judge Advocate Generals for each military service, and requested, in a non-partisan way, that they take appropriate steps to ensure that the subject of [unlawful orders] was being adequately addressed in both initial and ongoing training for all service members.
Obviously, they chose the more public option for a reason. In the days following the video’s release, it became clear that it was part of a broader Democratic initiative to accomplish precisely what Lucas described above.
As is often the case with Democratic propaganda campaigns, it took only a few days for the first connections to emerge.
On November 11, the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force published a FAQ sheet on refusing illegal military orders. The NLG calls itself “the nation’s oldest and largest progressive bar association.”
On Thursday, Powerline’s Bill Glahn reported on a billboard sign outside Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which reads, “Did you go airborne just to pull security for ICE?”
According to The Fayetteville Observer:
A new ad campaign on a Skibo Road billboard in Fayetteville encourages servicemembers to join its cause by asking, “Did you go airborne just to pull security for ICE?”
Sponsored by Win Without War, a progressive advocacy group that promotes diplomatic, peaceful and human-rights-based foreign policy, the billboards were launched across the U.S. this month, according to an announcement Sept. 9.
Glahn notes that one of Win Without War’s biggest backers is George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, which gave the group $1 million in 2024.
“If Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and the DOJ do not go after the people that are putting up these messages, this is the biggest, the most impactful escalation toward civil war we have ever seen in our generation.”
Billboards that allude to troops defying orders are illegal and… pic.twitter.com/9xSBv4zaei
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) November 27, 2025
I'm dying under a book deadline for Dec 1, but took a quick look. The website is notwhatyousignedupfor dot org .
The footer says Win Without War which links to EIN 27-0819099. It's a small 501(c)(4) which seems to have been named New Security Action in the past. Open Society… pic.twitter.com/y4FXragNPg
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) November 26, 2025
Conservatives on social media claim they have uncovered additional evidence of progressive groups trying to sow division between service members and the Trump administration. I can’t speak to the credibility of every claim, but there does seem to be enough smoke to suggest the possibility of fire.
I was reminded this morning of an often-repeated quote attributed to an anonymous member of Students for a Democratic Society, a well-known activist organization of the 1960s: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
Seen against the backdrop of that SDS maxim, the intent behind the “Seditious Six” video becomes much more clear. The supposed warning about unlawful orders — along with the nationwide billboard campaign, the NLG’s FAQ sheet, and any new connections that may come to light in the days ahead — is intended to drive a wedge between the military and the Trump administration and to create chaos.
But it is merely one piece of a far broader campaign. It’s just the latest battle in the Democrats’ decade-long war on President Donald Trump. In the end, the issue is not about unlawful orders, but rather the Democrats’ relentless, ruthless, obsessive determination to destroy the President.
🔥 🔥🔥Huge! From Steve Schmidt, formerly of Lincoln Project which brought us the Tiki Torch hoax, I bring you his latest influence operation. June 12, 2025 the day that his Save American Movement was announced. This was the first known mention of an influence operation to defy… pic.twitter.com/9YBpkaDoQM
— Bad Kitty Unleashed 🦁 💪🏻 (@pepesgrandma) November 27, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
“On November 11, the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force published a FAQ sheet on refusing illegal military orders. The NLG calls itself ‘the nation’s oldest and largest progressive bar association.'”
A large majority of attorneys are sh*tlibs for some reason.
As remember National Lawyers Guild…. they are against property rights. Left of Lenin.
That may be, but only a small minority are members of the communist NLG.
This is a naive view at best. The majority of coups and revolutions are driven by 1-2% of the population.
They have to go to school for a long time. During that time, especially in the last 40-50 years most of their teachers were libs. They also live in a world defined by symbol manipulation and therefore don’t always respect real world limits which often leads to the belief that if you can think it you can make it real.
…” all of which is intended to hamstring this President because they disagree with his,s policies.”
I’m thinking they’re more afraid of theft of tax dollars being exposed. We’ve all thought it’s a problem, but my guess is going from 7.7 trillion in debt in 2005 to 38 trillion in 20 years, there are some big time thefts going on by congress critters and their backers.
Might be more than a few citizens who will want long term jail sentences for them.
If Trump were truly a fascist dictator, the VERY FIRST thing he would have done is send a wet-work team to dispatch the Soros pigs with prejudice. He then would have posted their heads, on pikes, on the mall in DC for all the other Marxist, America-hating c*nts to see. People would have come from miles around to sit in lawn chairs and watch the crows eat their eyeballs out.
My opinion, stated downstairs a bit, is they want some military personnel to refuse a order like that billboard, or the ongoing propaganda these fast powerful boats hauling drugs are ‘ fisherman ‘.
Then hopefully trade a walk on part of a war, for lead roll in a cage.
They voted over twenty times not to pay the military. Now they are trying to tell them to mutiny? I see six morons.
So, so you think you can tell, Libs from the devil …
Nice Pink Floyd thingy you did there
The devil doesn’t kill his own children.
Raskin says considering war crimes for DOW for killing drug haulers….. These are not unformed military and rogue criminals …. the cartels have killed 600,000 Americans over the past 6 decades with the drugs they smuggled in. Blowing them out of the boats and then blowing them out of the water seems fitting. Raskin is just looking out for fellow “professionals”.
These days it seems soldiers pluck their eyebrows prior to deployment and then take a walk on the wild side.
What they are looking for is a dumb sacrificial lamb to refuse an order and then make him/her into a national leftist hero. They don’t give a damn about the service member, just their persecution and publicity!
My impression was that it was directed to the trannies and queers in the military, their political arm. The rest are likely to be traditionally patriotic.
I propose ten lashes with a rattan cane for those who are quite obviously choosing to be obtuse and/or pretending there’s any other realistic explanation (given the context and past statements of the ‘seditious 6’ to include their Q&A of SecDef Hegseth) but to try and gin up ‘resistance’ efforts within DoD+ IC to create further manufactured chaos and cosplay controversy. Matter of fact let’s apply the same to every future instance of feigned ignorance, turning the ‘blind eye’ and acting deliberately obtuse regardless of political affiliation, there’s quite a number of establishment GoP figures who’d qualify for their own punishment so let’s be nonpartisan in applying consequences.
After diving into some of the X comments linked in the article (and into several branches of links in the X postings themselves), it seems to me that this op goes very deep and is very broad. But because it is very deep and very broad, it is very likely that somewhere someone has already stepped on their collective dick and said the quiet part out loud – that this is a color revolution to destabilize the civil government’s control of the military, meaning that they intended to violate 18 U.S.C. § 2387 while making it appear that they weren’t doing so. Somewhere in that rabbit hole, there already exists the evidence to prosecute the lot of them.
I had the bumper sticker in 1993…Legalize Caning.
CIA ops +ColorRev, CIA in Congress, CIA asset murdering NG soldier. CIA is everywhere to be found these days. I wonder what they will do next? Alex Jones has a good idea.
Why isn’t George Soros and his Open Society Foundation being investigated?
They are. A lot of moving a lot of supposedly apolitical money into political ads, by funneling it through a series of different left wing non profits.
For what? There’s no basis for supposing they’ve broken any laws. They’re entitled to fund advocacy campaigns, including ones advocating the violent overthrow of the USA.
An absolute national security priority should be to de-fund these NGOs. I am sure that some NGOs are doing positive, important work for the country. But the positive seems to be outweighed by the negative, so my preference would be to eliminate all funding to these groups with extreme prejudice.
“Did you go airborne just to pull security for ICE?”
Did you join the military just for democrats to force you to flee from Afghanistan, leaving behind billions in weapons and equipment for terrorists to use?
Did you join the National Guard just for democrats to support a foreign national who killed one of your brethren on US soil and wounded another over you?
Did you join the military expecting democrats to threaten, harass, and attempt to prosecute federal agents performing their lawful duties in order to protect foreign criminals?
Jeff Childers of “Coffee &Covid” has a little more from some of the above sources in today’s post “Ambushed”. Of particular note is that the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force suggests that assisting ICE, protecting against “civilian” rioters or attacks on vessels in international or foreign waters by military members are illegal orders.
0ur inteI agencies (the BlG one primariIy) figured out Iong ago, getting rid of the iIIicit pharmaceuticaI trade is Iike pIaying whack-a-moIe. The faster you hit the moIes, the faster (and more) pop up untiI you’re compIeteIy overwheImed. So for aII intents and purpose, they took as much controI over the internationaI trade as they couId. But what to do w/their cut of the profits? 1. SeIf fund their ‘0ff the books 0ps.’ 2. Buy peopIe in power. 3. InstaII their peopIe into our three branches. This is why, when a venezueIan muIe boat gets buIIseyed, you’II have the keepers/beneficiaries of that extremeIy profitabIe endeavor, that creates and Iet’s them hold onto so much power and weaIth, howI in opposition to anyone harming their profits. That’s why you’re seeing the exact thing that slotkin and the seditious 6 are doing. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”.
This entire post is stuff and nonsense.
You start off correctly, pointing out that the video is a political op, not a civics lesson. But then you ignore your own statement and go haring off in a direction that depends on it not being political.
If this were true, then it would not be political.
No, they didn’t feel it was necessary. They know it wasn’t. They found it politically advantageous. You correctly put “remind” in scare quotes, because the video was not aimed at service members at all. They are irrelevant to it, and to the Dems’ purposes. The Dems have no interest in whether any service members even saw it, because it wasn’t aimed at them.
So you admit that there is nothing wrong with it. This alone invalidates the rest of your post.
However they did not treat members of the military like children. They didn’t treat them like anything at all, because it wasn’t aimed at them.
Nor did they insinuate that the President has issued unlawful orders. Rather they insinuated that he’s a dangerous lunatic who might do so at any moment, so we should vote Dem next year to stop him. That is what this is all about.
No, it was not. Its purpose was to get us, the non-military ordinary voters, to vote Democrat. How service members would react was irrelevant to them.
Indeed they could, which proves that they were not motivated by any such concern, genuine or otherwise. That does not in any way justify Lucas’s wild and ridiculous speculation about their true motive, which is plain and obvious and nothing like what he claims. His rant is exactly as cynical and dishonest as theirs.
The NLG is not “progressive”, it is communist. It was started as a front for the actual CPUSA. I don’t suppose it still has any formal connection with that organization, since the funding from Moscow dried up, but it remains a communist group. Nonetheless, this is America, where communists have the full right to preach their propaganda, including to advocate the violent overthrow of the USA.
No, they are not. That Tim Pool thinks they are makes him a bigger threat to our liberties than the NLG communists are.
No, it isn’t. it’s intended entirely to scare people into voting Democrat, and any effect it might have on the military is irrelevant to their purpose. They don’t care.
This is true. You started out right, and you ended right, so how did you go so far off the tracks in the middle?
Holy Walls Of Illogical Text, Batman!
It’s all 100% logical. If you think otherwise, feel free to point out any flaws you think you see. The fact is that the Republican take on this whole story is illogical and disingenuous.
The flaw in your argument is that many veterans (including me) have stated on this blog that the video conveys a hostile message to us.
The nearly universal message from Democrats is that Trump’s use of the military in cities and against Venezuelan drug boats is illegal. The message from the six democratic members of Congress is that military members better think twice about obeying these orders because there may be UCMJ prosecutions in the next Administration (if the Ds win the presidency). This is what I hear in the video.
If you understood military culture, you would see how this speaks to those who served. It is the height of arrogance to state that you know better what this video communicates to military members who have delivered and followed lawful orders.
How you perceive it, or claim to, has no bearing on the speakers’ intentions. Their purpose is plain as day, and if you’re not seeing it it’s because you don’t want to.
Which may or may not be the case.
Further, even if his use is illegal, that doesn’t make the orders themselves illegal. The servicemen are not being ordered to commit a crime; if he has exceeded his authority to deploy them, that’s his offense, not theirs.
However that has nothing to do with this video.
No, it is not. The speakers have made it very clear that it is not. They have consistently invoked the Nuremberg trials, and have acknowledged that none of these orders are of that kind. You have no basis for not taking them at their word, when their word makes perfect sense.
It is NOT ADDRESSED to those who have delivered and followed lawful orders. And it is the height of arrogance to pretend that any speech’s meaning can be dictated by how someone other than the speaker chooses to perceive it and take offense at it. That is the position of the left, that if you say something to someone and they take offense then the speech was offensive!
You repeatedly prove you have a strong opinion, but lack the knowledge and intellect to produce a cogent argument to support your opinion.
Thanks for the nice mention of my Substack article, “The Democrats’ “Illegal Orders” Video Isn’t About the Law. It’s About Undermining the Military’s Trust in Trump and the Chain of Command.” Here is a link for readers who may want to read the whole thing. https://johnalucas6.substack.com/p/the-democrats-illegal-orders-video