One of the hard realities of life is making mistakes, of believing things in youth, naivety, or perhaps even optimism that are eventually proven wrong by persevering through new experiences. One such instance forcefully confronted me in recent days. Having served in the U.S. Army for 20 years, I found former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s partisan assertion that there was an infestation of extremism loose in the U.S. military fictional and insulting. But I have now seen it with my own eyes. It’s time for a mea culpa.
I awoke on Thursday, September 11th, with the kind of sadness for our country that, compared to what I felt on September 12, 2001, the morning after the twin towers fell in New York.
“Did it really happen?” I asked myself as a college student, hoping it was all a terrible nightmare. Back in the present, I looked at my phone to see a message from a colleague. He shared a screen capture of Army Col. Junel Jeffrey’s take on Charlie Kirk’s assassination: “Sometimes we reap what we sow. That is all.”
Then another example came in, then another. It was clear to me that this had been no dream, but a very real, lived-out nightmare. More questions came, a repetition of what I wondered as the dust settled over lower Manhattan two decades before, when we could no longer deny the contempt that radical Islam has for the West. We asked things like “Why do they hate us so viciously? How many more will they try to kill? Will the nation rise to meet this murderous threat?” Now I ask these questions about Americans on the left.
We failed to defeat Al Qaeda over the course of two decades. Worse still, we allowed the American left wing to import that foreign terrorist association’s agenda, tactics, and desired end state: violent destruction of those marked as ‘infidels.’ Then we gave these neo-Qaeda agents safe harbor in the ranks of our military. Perhaps it’s time to reflect on the reality that a force that welcomed anti-American extremists in its ranks was ineffective at defeating extremists abroad.
The military is a cross-section of society, drawing membership from all perspectives and walks of life. I served with left-leaning soldiers early in my career. But none openly hated the nation. That changed during the Obama administration. Most Americans assume the military leans right, and that held true across most of the post-WWII professionalized force. It was the military’s professionalism that enabled it to stand as a bulwark against the left’s march through the institutions longer than all others.
Thus, the armed forces became a target in the same way that revolutionaries targeted militaries as critical centers of gravity in every totalitarian-enabling, murderous revolution of the 20th century. By 2020, the American military joined in on the bandwagon of our nation being in need of a redemption that could come only through Marxist self-loathing. Following that lead, there is a growing group of military members using the language of critical theorists in lambasting constitutional principles—words like homophobe, xenophobe, anti-immigrant—language of enemy ideologies that should be resoundingly rejected by the troops. They don’t know what ‘fascist’ means any more than they know what’s in the U.S. Constitution. Reports are coming in of military ‘leaders’ up to general officer ranks sharing similar things verbally.
For every revolutionary who outs himself or herself online, it’s likely that many more work against constitutional principles out of the public’s view.
Barack Obama assaulted the Department of Defense relentlessly during his reign, opening the floodgates for people morally disqualified to bear arms on behalf of the nation to join the armed forces. The repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, firing leaders who wouldn’t go along with a progressive agenda, and beginning the process to trans the force: all of this was done to break the military from the last vestiges of moral grounding.
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A military that doesn’t respect the basics of theology, human identity, marriage, and sex can be expected to do literally anything on behalf of paycheck authority. Jus in Bello became merely a call for military attorneys to find a way to yes. Those who anchored the military to truth were forced out, a process re-energized under the regime of Joe Biden. He found a willing accomplice in that endeavor with Lloyd Austin, a man of generally low reputation during his career as a military officer.
As years went on, I saw a growing willingness of progressives in the ranks to enthusiastically embrace anti-American doctrines whose aims are the dismantling and deconstruction of the U.S. It became not only safe, but encouraged for military commanders to forcefully advocate for extreme left causes in their official capacities. Left-wing ideology was incentivized. I personally witnessed left-wing influencers hired into positions far above their rank and qualifications, specifically because of their activism. In sharp contrast, constitutionalists in the ranks were put on notice that career survival depended on silence in the face of evil. This is not an argument about the 1st Amendment, but about decency and a worldview worthy of the public’s trust for military service, which is a privilege, not a right.
In the past few days, we have seen that thousands of military members embrace evil, self-outed through social media posts celebrating Charlie Kirk’s assassination. This level of depravity is far beyond what my worst fears had been of today’s mercenary force that has proven so friendly to the extreme left wing of American politics since 2010. Search #RevolutionariesintheRanks if you want to get a personal look at the scale of this crisis that the public dare not ignore.
Former Secretary of Defense under the Biden Administration Lloyd Austin went on a 60-day hunt for alleged ‘rightwing extremists’ in the force and couldn’t find them. His fishing expedition looked in the wrong direction. Austin should have been looking for troops who believe that holding to a traditional worldview is a qualification for the death penalty by vigilante. That search would have reaped a harvest, and it’s the exact kind of hunt the Department of War must now commence.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership, the warrior ethos is coming back to America’s military.
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