The leftist media’s recent tempest in a teapot regarding the alleged conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln has all the trappings of a pseudo-story — not unlike the fake news’ equally dubious reporting about “kids in cages” to torque up outrage over the Trump administration’s enforcement of immigration law.
Indeed, the two topics converged to form the Megazord of feeding frenzies on Sunday as the media breathlessly reported that the father of one of the aircraft carrier’s “beleaguered" crewmembers was detained by ICE during the Lincoln’s extended deployment to the Middle East.
Luis Manuel Aviles, a Nicaraguan national who has lived as an illegal alien in the U.S. for more than 20 years, was “doing everything the right way,” his stepdaughter told NBC News after he was arrested during a traffic stop in Key West.
However, the sudden media concern over the well-being of troops and their families may, in fact, be just the latest puzzle piece in a much deeper and well-coordinated campaign to simultaneously strengthen the military-industrial complex’s influence on U.S. foreign policy while eroding our military might.
Spoiler alert: It involves the Soros family.
A Change In Stripes
In the case of both the military and immigration detentions, dishonest reporting has claimed that a lack of luxury accommodations is tantamount to deprivation of basic human needs.
Military publications like the Pentagon-backed Stars and Stripes characterized the recently-relieved Lincoln’s at-sea conditions as “grueling” and told of spouses’ tearful confrontations with acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao.
“Interviews with active-duty sailors and family members, along with dozens of public social media comments and posts by crew members, describe sailors struggling with exhaustion and declining morale, including reports of suicidal thoughts and at least one instance where a crew member was prevented from jumping overboard,” the publication reported on Aug. 11.
Leaked complaints aboard the vessel included that, during the 266-day deployment, there was a lack of fresh milk and produce, and moldy showers.
Cao sought to disarm the narrative by making clear that the adversity had helped to separate the men from the boys.
“There is no question our young men and women have been pushed to their limits—but they have never broken,” he said in a statement. “They are rightly tired—but have never been out of the fight.”
Nonetheless, Stars and Stripes persisted in its campaign to bite the hand that feeds it, egged on by outlets like MSNow, the Associated Press and CBS News.
Fed-up Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went on to fire editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and two others after Slavin (who is technically a Pentagon employee) gave an unauthorized interview to complain about the supposedly grueling conditions that the S&S staff, like the Navy, was being made to endure.
Slavin was let go for insubordination after telling CBS that “in a hypothetical situation, censorship would be a red line,” according to his own account in multiple media reports.
Middle East reporter Lara Korte and publisher Max Lederer likewise were released under similar circumstances.
Lederer had recently declared his intention to retire in protest over the brouhaha, saying it had “become clear that my philosophy of leadership, and my understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes, differ in fundamental ways from the direction the leadership of the Department of Defense has for the organization.”
Korte also made clear in the CBS segment that her loyalty was to "editorial independence," and not to the Pentagon.
Today, I was informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes – not the Pentagon, not any administration, and not any policy maker.
— Lara Korte (@lara_korte) August 21, 2026
While Slavin himself was uncertain whether the reporting over the Lincoln controversy was directly connected to the terminations, the growing trend of military insubordination would seem to fit a nefarious pattern that warrants a deeper look.
China's Ballooning Influence
At the heart of the many-headed Hydra that the USS Lincoln story has spawned, there would seem to be a broader effort to demoralize troops and weaken the cohesion that drives the world’s greatest military force.
Perhaps some of it is simply the inevitable consequence of having access to social media, where servicemembers are allowed to air their grievances in ways previous generations could not.
Certainly, the challenges of deployment and its strenuous conditions are well documented in the literature of World War II, Vietnam and other military engagements. Could it be that higher standards of living — along with lower standards of recruitment during the Biden years — have simply made some troops softer than before?
On the other hand, it is hard to ignore certain patterns, particularly when they otherwise defy reason.
In the wake of recently declassified reports showing that the intelligence community actively sought to downplay China’s role in election-meddling, one must question how far its reach extends into U.S. military operations.
Indications all point to a coordinated infiltration — from preemptively pardoned Gen. Mark Milley’s secret calls to his Chinese counterpart, Li Zuocheng; to the Biden DOD’s alarming decision to allow a Chinese spy balloon to traverse U.S. airspace, hovering over military installations on a weeklong trek from Alaska to South Carolina.
China also has been slammed over its efforts to buy up land adjacent (or in close proximity) to military bases, with an estimated 277,336 acres — just under 1 percent of all U.S. agricultural land — in the clutches of the CCP as of December 2023, according to USDA data.
Moreover, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a ringleader of the so-called Seditious Six and Barack Obama’s favored choice to replace Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race, also has known business ties to China.
Kelly, who retired as a U.S. Navy captain and served as a NASA astronaut, was exposed for allowing significant Chinese investments in World View Enterprises, a Tucson-based company he cofounded that sought to develop high-altitude surveillance balloons, per Axios.
Kelly, one of two U.S. senators in the Seditious Six (alongside Michigan's Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst), sued to block Hegseth from retroactively demoting and court-martialing him.
A grand jury also declined to indict the sextet of leftist lawmakers over their open exhortations for servicemembers to defy their superiors and, instead, substitute their own judgment regarding the legality of military orders.
The Never-ending Coup
However, China may not be working alone in its efforts to undermine U.S. military force. A new report suggests part of the threat may be coming from within, with a well-known cabal of globalist supervillains helping to bankroll it.
Social-media influencer Jennica Pounds (who herself was revealed to have recently taken a job as a special government employee at the Pentagon last month) dropped a new bombshell late Sunday evening via her @DataRepublican account on X, formally linking the Seditious Six to the Transition Integrity Project, which plotted “war game” strategies in 2020 to prevent Trump from taking power — even if voters said otherwise. Among the options floated was launching another civil war in the U.S.
An article I've been working on for a while.
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) August 24, 2026
The Seditious Six did not spring out of nowhere. They came from an institutional lineage that started soon after President Trump got elected. https://t.co/ThQ8CFmZpx
The Transition Integrity Project’s leader was Rosa Brooks, who served as counselor to the undersecretary of Defense for policy during the Obama administration. Prior to that, she served as special counsel to Soros’ Open Society Institute.
In a January 2017 piece for Foreign Policy magazine just 10 days after Trump’s first inauguration, Brooks already was floating strategies that would later bounce around the leftist-media echo chamber for how to remove Trump.
If impeachment, pressure campaigns for resignation and invoking the 25th Amendment to declare Trump unfit for office all failed, Brooks suggested one final failsafe: “The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders,” she wrote.
Data Republican’s investigation went on to provide the receipts showing that the missing link between Soros and the Seditious Six was a 501(c)(4) nonprofit known as National Security Action, one of several “interlocking organizations” staffed by Obama surrogates that helped set the stage for Kelly et al. with a series of policy papers attacking Trump’s Defense Department.
The entire effort seemed to work in tandem with a complicit press corps, the report noted, pointing to a remarkable level of “institutional incuriosity” when it came to the far-reaching influence of National Security Action.
“The organization that placed dozens of people in the Biden administration barely exists in the public record,” it said. “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.”
Worse Than Watergate?
The one fallacy of Data Republican’s report may be in thinking that all of this is new to the Trump era.
According to at least one prominent Watergate researcher, the pressure campaign to remove massively popular President Richard Nixon also may have been rooted in a military coup.
Author Tegan Mathis argues that the plot was masterminded by figures including ambitious Gen. Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, who would go on to serve as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State.
The intricate theory suggests the military also was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with Watergate being part of the extended cover-up.
Early in my Watergate and JFK assassination investigations, I tended to ask myself if Alexander Haig and other Deep State actors were CIA. I more or less decided Haig was CIA, but I now realize I was asking the wrong question. ... READ ON:
I think we've all been conditioned to do this. Was George HW Bush CIA? Is Carl Bernstein CIA? It's what Americans ask when we see certain people doing shady, sneaky things.
We reflexively ask as if the answer might in itself be some kind of grand revelation.
It's not that it was a mistake to describe Haig as CIA. Or maybe it was. It's just that I wasn't quite seeing what I was looking at.
Looking back, it would have been more correct to describe how CIA operations and CIA personnel migrated to Haig, not how Haig migrated to the CIA.
Is this a distinction without a difference? Maybe. But then again, the JFK assassination was definitely a US Army operation, not a CIA operation.
Early in my Watergate and JFK assassination investigations, I tended to ask myself if Alexander Haig and other Deep State actors were CIA. I more or less decided Haig was CIA, but I now realize I was asking the wrong question. ... READ ON:
— Tegan Mathis (@TeganMathis) August 22, 2026
I think we've all been conditioned to… pic.twitter.com/puKlag1ZIl
A competing theory on Watergate — which was famously broken by ex-Naval Intelligence officer Bob Woodward — suggests the Nixon coup was a military operation resulting from foreign policy disputes that involved the president’s détente with China and withdrawal from Vietnam.
In a New York Times op-ed in February, Newsmax correspondent James Rosen presented newly unsealed evidence from Nixon’s own testimony in a committee hearing suggesting that the origin of today’s deep state may have been the Pentagon’s efforts to spy on the White House after being excluded from key foreign-policy decisions.
Read for yourself my op-ed that @POTUS reposted on #TruthSocial last night, published February 8 in the @nytimes, disclosing grand jury testimony, held secret since 1975, on the Pentagon spy ring against President Nixon and Henry Kissinger. #DeepState https://t.co/TYEDn1NnFo
— James Rosen (@JamesRosenTV) March 3, 2026
Yet, perhaps it is a testament to the transformative power of the Trump administration that the very forces suspected of killing one president and leading another to resign have now been reduced to complaining about malaise over a lack of fresh milk and produce.
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