The Pentagon has announced that it is investigating Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona regarding possible breaches of military law when the former Navy pilot joined other Democrats in the recent video calling for troops to defy “illegal orders.” A federal law allows retired service members to be recalled to active duty on orders of the Secretary of War for possible courts martial. Kelly’s statements in the video may have interfered with the “loyalty, morale, or good order and discipline of the armed forces…A thorough review of these allegations has been initiated to determine further actions, which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures,” the statement said.
Ethics Alarms already explained what was unethical about the video. It was a cheap political stunt, unethically implying that what had not occurred and will not occur had occurred or was in danger of occurring. It was clever, Machiavellian and, as the late Harry Reid would say, “It worked!” The stunt lured Trump into behaving like an ass, overstating the issues involved, and giving the Axis more metaphorical sticks to beat him with. Even with the admissions by some of Kelly’s co-conspirators that they didn’t know of any illegal orders by Trump that justified the “public service announcement,” it still was a net public relations loss for the President, who doesn’t need any more of them. Now Pete Hegseth is joining the botch. Terrific.
Observations:
1. Haven’t Republicans heard of the Streisand Effect? Making such a fuss over the video is just guaranteeing that it stays in the news, along with the typically biased and inflammatory news coverage, like “Trump calls for EXECUTION of members of Congress!” Hegseth’s investigation could be justified, but with an irresponsible and partisan news media, there is no chance, none, that the public will understand the issues involved. With those as the conditions that prevail, the announcement of the investigation is incompetent.
2. No, for Kelly, a member of the military community, this is not necessarily protected speech. Obama and Trump fired generals for theirwords, and the question here is whether a “wink-wink/nudge-nudge” statement of military policy can be punished for its intent and implications rather than the speech’s substance. I think it’s a close call, and not worth exploring considering the political costs.
3. The message itself was unethically incomplete. Soldiers aren’t usually experts in military law, and the decision to defy an order of any kind, but especially one from the Commander in Chief, comes with serious risks. There will be a court martial, and in such a proceeding, the military tribunal’s presumption will be that the order in question was legal. The burden of proving otherwise is on the defendant. An ethical video would have explained that, but actually informing troops about their duties regarding illegal orders wasn’t the point of the video. The point was to both impugn and troll President Trump.
4. Once again, I am reminded of my father’s position that the so-called Nuremberg rule was hypocritical in the extreme. As in the post-Civil War Andersonville Trial of the Confederate officer running an infamous prisoner-of-war camp, the only U.S. legal precedent for trying opposing soldiers for “war crimes”,”” before the Nuremberg Trials, German officers were tried and punished for not doing what American soldiers wouldn’t have done in similar circumstances. My father had standing to make that observation as a WWII officer who had refused to follow several illegal orders, as he explained in his memoirs.
5. The assumption is that the Democrats’ video was a swipe at the military’s attacks on Venezuelan boats allegedly running drugs into U.S. waters. Republicans are probably furious at themselves for not thinking of this stunt themselves, when President Obama was ordering drone strikes on American citizens (and terrorists) abroad without due process. Those orders were definitely illegal but, again, having a partisan press corps is a great advantage for Democrats.
6. I just checked: Althouse had a post on this issue yesterday, and as is frequently the case on her blog, she posted the facts without taking any position on the issue herself, leaving her commenters to slug it out. I don’t approve of that practice. She’s the bloggress: it’s her job to present her analysis, not just start a fight.
Ethics Alarms 
President Trump, the consummate troll, got bested by his own game and fell for the same trap he has laid so successfully on Democrats numerous times since he took office in January. The correct response would have been “blissful derision”, laughing at the Democrats and telling them “nice try…do better next time.” Obviously, we have the advantage of 20/20 hindsight, seeing how the President reacted. But still, he has gobs of people in his corner. Somebody with “convincing power” had to have seen this. Maybe someone tried to reveal the game, and the President was just too self-absorbed to listen. I don’t know…
Even the best players get played once in a while.
And in all likelihood, the relationship between Trump and the other side is so poisoned now that neither side can just “step back” from anything any longer. Everything is a battle royal.
Politics stink…and stupid politics really stink.
Hegseth’s investigation could be justified, but with an irresponsible and partisan news media, there is no chance, none, that the public will understand the issues involved. With those as the conditions that prevail, the announcement of the investigation is incompetent.
Wouldn’t putting this position into practice render anything the current administration might do incompetent?
Good point.
OB.
Before I read your comment I was starting writing Goebbels statement about a lie told once and one told a thousand times.
A corollary to that is a claim or insinuation without a vociferous rebuttal is seen as proof for the claim or insinuation.
I have no problem with Trump calling out these individuals but he could have done it better by addressing the military directly and calmly. He could have in an understated way that explain that officers who make the suggestion that his orders might be illegal should first take their concerns to a JAG officer who will reinforce the proper protocol. He should also point out that failure to follow the chain of command can have disastrous consequences for the soldier who feels it necessary to ignore orders.
The Streisand effect works both ways. Captain Kelly and Slotnik are being justly condemned by career military officers and to a lesser and indirect degree the Sunday shows. Your point above is spot on.
Do you have a link?
I cannot give you a specific link because I am hearing the comments from a number of military personnel on WMAL and other news outlets. Two that come immediately to mind are General Jack Keene and Colonel Curt Schlicter. Another was a 30 year JAG officer who called into a talk radio broadcast who roundly condemned the video. Most of those that I know from the military see the video as a means to undermine the chain of command.
I doubt if it was specifically aimed at the enlisted men but rather the senior officers who would ignore orders that come from the president. Had they just had a meeting of those officers they would have been conspiring with the military to engage in a coup de tat. That is why they did not go that route. Secondly, Slotnick is an ex CIA analyst that knows how to undermine governments through the effective use of propaganda. Each participant in the video repeats the claims to drive it into your head that you have a duty to reject orders you feel are illegal.
It is hard to see this as a public service when Slotnick used the “Code Red” example from the movie A Few Good Men, Nuremberg and Mai Lai as predicates for the need.
On She stated that the President was using “legal gymnastics” to use lethal force against the drug runners but given that the last declared war was WW2 I have to ask why do we believe that we can only be in a war against those dressed in uniforms and shooting bullets or dropping bombs. If you want to undermine the ability of the US to defend itself using narcotics to kill or at a minimum disable personnel seems like a reasonable strategy
as a veteran I disagree. The previous administration court martial’ed a colonel for commenting adversely on the Afghanistan clusterfuck. He was sentenced and served time in prison. He is currently working for the Sec War as a policy advisor.
Hegseth is working to restore the military to its original purpose, which requires discipline and honor.
Kurt Schilling is the name, on my phone atm.
oops,
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021/10/06/lt-col-stuart-scheller-charged-with-6-ucmj-violations/
will not occur had occurred or was in danger of occurring
You can’t possibly know that.
Of course I do. Because 46 out of 46 Presidents for 250 years have never ordered the military to act illegally to the extent that the military would be justified in refusing. Men don’t get elected President who would do that or even consider doing it seriously. The presumption otherwise is the Trump Deranged belief that this POTUS is evil. It’s a destructive and stipid position, with no evidence to support it whatsoever.
Background:
The Seven Years of History behind Seditious Six
·
What the legacy Pentagon press corps refused to cover.
The Seditious Six video did not came out of nowhere in November 2025. It developed over a period of about eight years among academics, NGOs, and activists, with the final goal to rewrite the relationship between the military and the executive branch.
The story begins all the way back in
January 30, 2017
— ten days into the first Trump presidency —
Rosa Brooks
published a piece in Foreign Policy laying out four ways to remove a sitting president before his term ended: impeachment, the 25th Amendment, resignation under pressure, and a military coup. Of the last, she imagined the moment senior officers would look at a lawful commander-in-chief and refuse:
Brooks had been
Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
, a political appointee inside the Pentagon from 2009 to 2011, reporting to
Michèle Flournoy
. Before the Pentagon, she was
special counsel to the President at George Soros’s Open Society Institute
. After it, she went to Georgetown Law, where she still holds a
professorship
and participates in the university’s national-security programming.
One year after that article ran, a new organization was quietly incorporated.
National Security Action
– co-chaired by Obama deputy national security advisor
Ben Rhodes
and future Biden national security advisor
Jake Sullivan
— was funded largely,
in Puck’s words, by Alex Soros since its inception.
Rosa Brooks joined its
advisory council
.
Stage one: the personnel (2018)
Brooks would spend the next three years helping to operationalize her 2017 paper.
In late 2018, she joined the advisory council of
National Security Action
— the organization assembling the personnel that would eventually staff Biden’s national security positions. Prior to joining, she sat on the
board of Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs
, the grant-making entity upstream of the money that funded it. She was a senior fellow at
New America
— which itself takes
$1 million-plus annually from Open Society
— running its Future of War program, the intellectual shop studying exactly the civil-military questions her network would later litigate.
One person. Four seats. The board of the funder, the think tank writing the framework, the council assembling the staff, and … then, the project that would rehearse what that staff should do with power.
Stage two: the rehearsal (2020)
In late 2019, Brooks co-founded the
Transition Integrity Project
. In June 2020, TIP ran a set of war games modeling how a contested 2020 election might unfold — including scenarios turning on whether institutions, up to and including the military, would recognize the outcome. It operated under the umbrella of
Protect Democracy
, which had taken
$650,000 from Open Society
. John Podesta participated. So did roughly a hundred other senior figures. Only about ten of their names are public. The rest have never been disclosed.
In 2017, Rosa Brooks had asked whether institutions had options to oust a President. By 2020, she was rehearsing these scenarios with over a hundred people in Georgetown University.
Stage three: the legal machinery (2024)
By 2024, allegations that Georgetown University was undermining electoral choices had intensified.
Mary McCord
, former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, runs the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, the same national-security faculty home as Brooks. She had spent 2020
building ICAP’s model against unlawful armed force
: fact sheets to all fifty states, coalitions of attorneys general and police chiefs, and — in her own words from a November 2020 Brookings panel — “I manned the voter intimidation helpline throughout the day.”
In January 2024, she told
NBC News
she was applying that same model to the military:
“We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.”
The same year, Rep. Pete Sessions
put the effort on the congressional record
, alleging a coordinated campaign to “suppress Article Two provisions defining presidential control of the military.”
Stage four: the academic scaffolding (fall 2025)
In June 2025, the
Democracy Defenders Fund
— with, in its own words, “the assistance of Mary McCord of ICAP” — published President Trump’s Deployment of the National Guard Is Unlawful and Unprecedented, arguing that his move to federalize the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. § 12406, without invoking the Insurrection Act, was exactly that.
The five-month runway (summer-fall 2025)
In the summer and fall leading up to the Seditious Six video, interlocking organizations primed messaging that would result in the Seditious Six video:
Reports said five of the six lawmakers had been recruited through
New Politics Academy
, a candidate pipeline. One of the six, Rep. Maggie Goodlander, is
married to Jake Sullivan
, the co-founder of National Security Action.
Soros: the family and money behind these eight years
George Soros’s personal wealth flows into the
Fund for Policy Reform
, a 501(c)(4) with roughly $841 million in assets; Alexander Soros sits on its board. The Fund sends hundreds of millions annually to the
Open Society Policy Center / Action Fund
, where Alex Soros also sits. That entity is the
documented primary funder
of National Security Action, a majority of everything the organization has ever raised.
Open Society appears at every node of the eight-year construction:
And the man who ran the Soros advocacy checkbook,
Tom Perriello
, sat on National Security Action’s advisory council, the organization his own entity was funding.
The Pentagon press corps never looked
I searched “National Security Action” across 1,600-plus transcripts from Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS, the Council on Foreign Relations, Heritage, and dozens of other institutions, and the organization appears zero times. Its co-founders appear in more than seventy of those same transcripts, always under their government titles.
Its website currently lists no staff, no board, no advisory council, no annual report, no financial disclosures. When Puck’s Julia Ioffe asked the organization to confirm the most basic facts about itself, she
hit a wall
:
The organization that placed dozens of people in the Biden administration barely exists in the public record. And yet they, among other Soros-backed institutions, were at the center of an eight-year campaign to rewrite the relationship between troops and their commander-in-chief.
This institutional incuriosity is the legacy of the old Pentagon press corps.
A note on method: this piece was researched and drafted with AI assistance, working from a wide corpus of primary documents — IRS filings, archived organizational pages, scraped social media postings, and YouTube transcripts — that I assembled and directed. The thesis, the judgment, and the editing are mine.
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https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2091733646533100027
How did anyone take her seriously after suggesting a coup?