ASPEN, Colorado (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has canceled the scheduled appearances of a dozen officials at a security conference being held this week by the left-wing Aspen Institute, declaring the Trump administration will not participate in legitimizing the organization.
“The Department of Defense has no interest in legitimizing an organization that has invited former officials who have been the architects of chaos abroad and failure at home,” Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson told Just the News of the pullout from the Aspen Security Forum. “They are antithetical to the America First values of this administration. Senior representatives of the Department of Defense will no longer be participating in an event that promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the President of the United States.”
The Aspen Security Forum describes itself as “the premier national security and foreign policy conference in the United States,” and “a nonpartisan public venue for domestic and global leaders to discuss the key national security and foreign policy issues of the day since 2010.”
This year’s speaker lineup includes past members of Democrat and Republican administrations, policy analysts ranging from trade to foreign affairs to cybersecurity, representatives of the Council on Foreign Relations, and more. Two current members of other Trump administration departments, Special Envoy for Hostage Response Adam Boehler and U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Thomas Barrack, are still listed as participating.
The Aspen Institute was founded in 1950 to “provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues,” but like many such nonprofits now teems with left-wing bias, thanks in part to the financial support of prominent leftists such as George Soros. Among the issues Aspen promotes are the notion that America suffers from “structural racism” and that the Earth is in danger from “global climate change.”
In 2023, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before Congress about the “Twitter Files,” a trove of inside information about the social network now known as X that Elon Musk released upon buying the company, which shed light on how the Biden administration worked with nonprofits like Aspen to indirectly censor dissenting speech and suppress politically-inconvenient stories on social media.
“We discovered that the Aspen Institute had created a workshop that was attended by basically all of the major media, as well as all the major social media platforms, to basically ‘pre-bunk’ in advance the Hunter Biden laptop, even though there was no evidence that it existed outside of the fact that the FBI knew that they had it because they got it in December 2019,” Shellenberger said. “So, to have the Aspen Institute trying to persuade people not to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story in August and September of 2020 was quite chilling and disturbing to see.”
