The Military Has an Extremist Problem, Just Not the One Lloyd Austin Has Wet Dreams About

streiff reporting for RedState

When retired general Lloyd Austin was designated as Secretary of Defense by Joe Biden, one of the first things he did was order an “extremist stand-down.” As a result, all training was paused for a period of time with Defense to focus on the real enemy, your fellow soldier/sailor/airman/Marine who might have a different worldview than that prevailing in Washington, D.C., and some other large cities.

What was introduced into the US military under the guise of stamping out a problem that, to the extent it even existed, had no impact on morale, discipline, or combat effectiveness, and installed the beginnings of a political commissar-style regime that seems to be modeled on the Soviet Army. The crime Austin was rooting out was not actual actions; he was focused on classifying a lot of traditional American values and conservative political views as causes for dismissal from the service. When carried out within the context of the Critical Race Theory orthodoxy that has been imposed, the policy could get you booted for wanting to judge men on the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

As we’re seeing, all extremism is not the same.

A little earlier today, a TikTok video was making the rounds. It was pretty tame, as TikTok videos go. The star of the episode is an Army noncommissioned officer named Cindy Bronson. She is a truck driver stationed at Fort Bliss, TX. According to reports I’ve read, she’s a “gay rights activist” (go figure, right?) and a TikTok personality with some 160,000 followers.

This is the setup. Bronson is responding, nearly sentence by sentence, to another TikTok video of what appears to be a somewhat crazy lady calling for a military coup and warning that if the military doesn’t come through, then “gun owners” are going to turn out and create a “bloodbath.”

I see this every once in a while, and I wonder if the people calling for this really want to be ruled by the people we’ve seen in military command over the past 6-8 years. I know I don’t. I believe the US Constitution provides the best form of governance in human history, minus any opinion Ruth Bader Ginsburg ever had.

As ugly as the next four years will be, I’ll work hard to see it preserved. If it gets to the point where our form of government becomes destructive to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and it no longer has the consent of the governed, then I’ll be right there in the front rank pushing to alter or abolish it and, if necessary, institute new government. I will never push for a military coup because men with guns are historically reluctant to cede power to men without guns.

Bronson is obviously not the sharpest clawhammer in the bag; skip to about 1:05 for the interesting part.

“I mean, I’m no expert but that kinda sounds like a terroristic threat because she’s talking about a bunch of gun owners going out and starting a blood bath. Like, have you never heard of the Insurrection Act? There’s reasons why the military doesn’t deploy within the U.S. and if it did, your little good ol’ boy system is not going to fare well for you. Understand that if active duty military actually get deployed within the United States that weapon is not just pointed at other people, other countries, it’s pointed at you. If you do not get In your house when I tell you to, you become the enemy. Martial law. You know where your rights get curtailed. You don’t have all those same freedoms that the Constitution guarantees at that point. So be careful what you wish for and stop opining about things you don’t understand.

Just some observations.

A soldier in uniform with a large, if slightly dim, social media following appearing to get physically excited as she describes shooting down fellow Americans for not following her orders is not a good look. However, the Army letting this pass will signal that this type of opinion is accepted as normal by the Army.

That is the least of the problems.

Her fixation on other people having to do what she tells them to do or be shot doesn’t seem like one a mentally stable person would have. She apparently doesn’t watch the news either; otherwise, she might be respectful of the odds of success for a bunch of determined “good ol’ boys” facing off the US military.

This kind of classifying a significant swath of America…’your little good ol’ boy system’…as potential enemies is no more sane than Aryan Brotherhood types who fantasize about a race war. The fact that she is spreading this propaganda indicates that she has crossed the boundary into extremism — if that word is to have any meaning other than “conservative white guys.”

Bronson doesn’t care about violence in the streets, unless it is her kind of violence. This is her commentary on the Portland riots:

The overarching problem here is not Bronson; it is a chain of command and military service that has promoted her to a leadership position despite her extremist views. It is impossible to believe that they are unaware of her cutting these videos while wearing the uniform. Can you imagine the sh**hole her unit must be to have people like her in charge of other soldiers? I mean, if she talks trash like this about her family, can you imagine how she treats the straight soldiers she’s supposed to lead?

Then we must ask how this can even happen. Is her chain of command in agreement with this kind of Antifa fantasy? Or is her chain of command afraid to discipline her because they don’t want to take the heat for cracking down on a leftwing non-heterosexual woman for spouting views the Secretary of Defense probably agrees with?