Article by Kurt Schlichter in Townhall
Would the Military Side with Leftist Tyranny or with America?
The Democrats are wargaming how to steal the 2020 election, and after Grandpa Badfinger selected Lady Mac (Willie) Brown, their last best hope seems to be the military marching in and removing Donald Trump from the White House after he wins and they refuse to accept the election results. But will the military actually do the bidding of the coterie of Marxist Muppet masters with their fingers, ironically, up inside Joe Biden like he is a crusty, senile Kermit?
Which he is, except the real Mr. Miss Piggy isn’t a manifestly mentally incompetent socialist Trojan Frog.
And don’t even get me started on his veep, Botoxic K.
Between the perma-coup against the American people, the mainstream media’s myriad and shameless lies, and the Democrats’ election fraud agenda (including the Golden Ticket to anarchy that is mail-in voting), it is absolutely clear that the Democrats will not accept Donald Trump’s impending victory. It is also clear that their plan is to sow chaos when they lose, with outright ballot box-stuffing, riots, and endless counts and recounts, so that they can obscure Trump’s win enough to create a patina of fake doubt about the result. Then they will rush into some Hawaiian courtroom and get some Hawaiian judge to announce that the Delaware Basement Crustacean won the election. The idea is to then have a deus ex militaria where somehow the establishment gets reestablished forever at gunpoint. And the liberal elite is said establishment.
But it’s not completely crazy, unfortunately, to consider whether the military, or at least a portion of it, would cooperate in a liberal attempt to seize power. Here’s the troubling truth: the generals will absolutely fall in line with the liberal elite.
“Wait,” the reader asks. “Aren’t generals and majors and stuff conservative?”
Well, in temperament, yes. But they are not conservative in terms of American politics. And for that reason, it is entirely possible, if not likely, that many of them would take the side of the leftist establishment if called upon to resolve a disputed election instead of demurring to the politicians to decide the matter themselves.
Wow. Just writing that is scary. But these are scary times, and we are blessed with what Instapundit Glenn Reynolds tells Americans is “the worst ruling class in your history.” The generals are absolutely a part of that failed caste.
The generals – a term I’ll use to describe the majority of senior active duty officers (Colonel/Captain O6 and up; note that reserve officers have a slightly different perspective, being civilians most of the time) – are creatures of the establishment. Yes, it is absolutely true that many of them showed great courage in battle against foreign enemies and made great personal sacrifices. It is also true that in the culture war they have been entirely AWOL. They are terrified of crossing the establishment by doubting its preferred mores, and that is why they accept every bizarre modern SJW trope regardless of its effect on combat readiness. They will charge a jihadi with a bayonet and wet themselves in the face of an irate Kirsten Gillibrand. It’s weird, but it’s true.
Here, Trump and his populist movement are agents of rapid and disruptive change. The military, in which these generals grew up and which gives them their identities, is the least disruptive institution in American society. The lengthy and laudable tradition of civilian authority over the military, as well as the hierarchical nature of the military itself, makes it instinctively against rapid, disruptive change.
Though the Democrats have moved left, they maintain a headlock on the institutions, and the institutions are what the generals are loyal to even if the leaders of those institutions have morphed into rabidly anti-American aspiring dictators. To embrace Trump and populism is to repudiate the whole establishment hothouse that grew their power and prestige. They would be opposing themselves.
Look at CNN and see the endless parade of fully semi-automatic Obama generals babbling like idiots about how Trump is ruining their sweet gigs, though they don’t put it quite that way. Look at the appalling Chairman of the Joint Chiefs apologizing for following the elected president’s lead. And, especially, look at their horror that America is ending those endless wars.
Those are the generals, and they have the elite’s back, not yours. A general who said “all lives matter” or refused to buy the ridiculous but fashionable notion that America’s greatest strategic threat is the weather a century hence or uttered some other heresy would not be a general much longer – and certainly not cash in on a sweet post-retirement gig at Boeing.
But most Americans don’t see that. Because America remembers the military of 30 years ago that could actually win a war in a reasonable period of time (as we did in Desert Storm). Today’s generals benefit from residual respect for yesterday’s Cold War military. Americans are unaware of the devastated culture cultivated by our military senior leadership. Here’s the ruinous legacy of today’s generals: Afghanistan is a disaster and still not won, ships colliding and catching fire due to gross failures of leadership, boats of sailors on tape whimpering as they surrender to the Iranian Navy, senior officers leaking to the media, colonels, generals and admirals getting court-martialed, massive prosecutorial misconduct by JAGs, woke West Point (which recently graduated an open communist), and troops kneeling before rioters. It’s a military that puts Diversity Day before D-Day.
Unfortunately, the first 24 hours of war with China would make the rot agonizingly apparent – at the cost of thousands of our warriors’ precious lives. They’ll deny it, of course, and I fervently hope I’m wrong. But I fear I’m not, because none of the incentives in today’s military are aimed toward achieving combat readiness instead of achieving ideological conformity.
So, count on the active duty generals to fall in line when the New York Times trumpets the Democrats’ line that Trump’s victory is illegitimate. That’s the voice of the people they really take their orders from.
Then what?
Good question, but remember that the military is not just the generals. The military includes the middle-grade and junior officers and non-commissioned officers as well as the enlisted troops. And while the woke poison has spread into these ranks too, there is a real question about whether those leaders, who are where the tank treads meet the road, would follow an order to make war on American citizens.
That’s a harsh way of putting it, but making war is what the military does – it uses fire and maneuver to destroy the enemy, and to the liberal establishment, those of us who refuse to allow the election victory of our candidate to be undone will be the enemy. Intervention by the military necessarily means America forces killing American patriots.
And no, the New York Times’ Marxist newsroom will not be exploding in protests over that domestic use of military force; it will be loudly cheering it.
We know we cannot trust this generation of generals to stand up for freedom, but I’d like to think that a good portion of the troops would refuse to enter civilian politics in favor of the anti-American left. Yet, I would have also liked to think that we’d never see law enforcement officers eagerly obeying the fascist decrees of liberal poohbahs. The sight of overeager Barney Fifes hassling citizens about piehole thongs made it clear that for some people oaths come behind the giddy joy of power and keeping their pensions.
So, the question is, what will our troops do? Will they make war on the American people so that Basement Biden’s puppet masters can turn America into Venezuela 2: The Quickening? Or will they say “No” to imposing a leftist dictatorship, which is what the Democrats’ Revenge Agenda proposes? Our troops are loved in large part because they don’t take a side in domestic politics; if they do, and turn on the people for the benefit of a senile old puppet and the Truancy Avenger, well, that affection evaporates.
Sadly, we cannot rely on the generals to not make the error. Let’s just that the danger is mooted because Trump’s margin of victory is so great that the Democrats cannot cheat.
