Liz Wheeler exposes the color revolution playbook targeting Trump — and why Pete Hegseth is public enemy No. 1

According to BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been quietly fighting a “legitimate color revolution effort by the deep state.”

The institutional left, she argues, has been attempting to “control the president’s every thought, every action, every decision, every policy in order to impose on you wokeism and destructive [left-wing policies],” and it’s Pete Hegseth who’s standing in its way.

This isn’t just her hunch either. On this episode of “The Liz Wheeler Show,” Liz dives into a recent @DataRepublican thread that blew the lid off the shocking truth behind the nonstop attacks on Pete Hegseth.

Liz begins by reading through the X thread posted by @DataRepublican on Monday:

The thread argues that Hegseth is being relentlessly attacked not because of any personal scandals (drinking, women, etc.), but because he’s a loyal secretary of war who would prevent the military/security forces from defecting.

According to the thread, this loyalty is what’s stopping a would-be soft coup attempt against Trump. Citing academic studies, training videos, and planning docs from left-leaning groups that emphasize getting security forces to disobey or stand down, the post posits that you can’t execute a successful color revolution without flipping or neutralizing the military — and Hegseth, being outside its influence networks and loyal to Trump, makes that impossible.

Two people @DataRepublican highlights in the thread are Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan — “the two most cited scholars in the color revolution field.” According to their research into 323 different regime change campaigns, security force defections make those campaigns “46 times more likely to succeed.”

“Once you meet these women, you will not only understand who is behind much of the civil unrest in our country, but how they do it,” says Liz.

Stephan, she argues, “is the epitome of a blob creature,” citing her careers at the State Department, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and in academia. Liz notes that she also founded and directed the “program on nonviolent action at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP).”

Chenoweth, who “serves in many different capacities at Harvard University,” is famous in the color revolution world, Liz says, for coining the “3.5% rule,” which argues that it takes only 3.5% of the population’s participation, combined with a military willing to defect, for a color revolution to be successful.

Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, Liz contends, are connected to the founders of the No Kings movement, Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, who “get their funding … almost directly from George Soros.”

“Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg are on video talking about how their protests, the No Kings protests, are essentially a color revolution,” says Liz, playing a clip from their joint podcast where they interviewed none other than Chenoweth.

“Maria Stephan is also involved in the No Kings protest through her organization New Horizons Project. She actually trained No Kings protesters,” she continues, playing more videos from @DataRepublican capturing Stephan training protesters on how successful campaigns depend on “defections and loyalty shifts within key institutional pillars,” specifically business, labor, faith, education, civil service, and military/police, which must be “[cracked]” so that “the entire edifice can crumble.”

Liz says Stephan’s framework is “almost exactly the same thing” as Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the “war of position,” which argues that revolutionaries must first capture the institutions of culture, education, media, ideas, and other key pillars of society in order to eventually seize power.

In the same thread, @DataRepublican also highlighted Gene Sharp, the father of modern “color revolution” tactics, and Hardy Merriman (Sharp’s former assistant), for co-writing the main training manual used for regime changes in over 50 countries.

Merriman then created a U.S. version that tells government and military people: You don’t owe loyalty to the president — only to the Constitution — and teaches them how to quietly defect (slow down, leak, ignore orders, etc.) so the regime can be brought down.

All of this explains the “character assassination” attempts on Pete Hegseth, says Liz.

“Seventy-two hours after President Trump named Pete Hegseth as his nominee for secretary of war … Democracy Playbook 2025 specifically named Pete Hegseth as a threat because he cannot be convinced or compromised to the point of defection,” she says, noting that this playbook was edited by “Democrat super lawyer” Norman Eisen, who Liz exposed last year for being one of the central architects and coordinators of a “resistance” network seeking to topple the Trump administration.

But that’s just the beginning of the intricate network Liz uncovers in this episode.

She continues unpacking the rest of @DataRepublican’s thread to reveal how these color revolution tactics are allegedly being deployed against Trump right now and why unco-optable Pete Hegseth is literally the one man preventing a successful soft coup.

If you want the full picture — and to see exactly how deep this goes — watch the entire eye-opening episode above.

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