Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?
Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.
1) There was no escape from ideological indoctrination—anywhere.
TV commercials, a job in the bureaucracy, or military assignment all hinged not so much on merit, expertise, or past achievement. What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.
Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion. Careerists assert that America was always and still is a systemically racist country, without ever producing proof or a sustained argument.
2) The Soviets fused their press with the government. Pravda or “Truth” was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Party partners.
In 2017, some university and independent media monitoring centers found that 93 percent of American network media coverage of the early Trump Administration was negative. The most inflammatory of the media’s political assertions—Trump-Russia collusion, Hunter Biden’s laptop was a product of “Russian disinformation,” and Capitol Officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by a Trump rioter inside the Capitol—were all false.
3) The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents. Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot “insurrectionary” sentiments.
The Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.
Left-wing CNN recently alleged that the Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security is considering partnering with private surveillance firms to get around government prohibitions on scrutinizing Americans’ expression. From 2015 to 2017, the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department engaged in efforts to monitor and injure the Trump campaign and then sabotage a presidential transition.
4) The Soviet educational system sought not to enlighten, but to indoctrinate young minds in proper government-approved thought. Currently, cash-strapped universities nationwide are hiring thousands of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staffers and administrators. Their chief task is to scan admissions, hiring, curriculum, and administration of universities. Like good commissars, our diversity czars police compliance with the official narrative that a flawed America must confess, apologize, and renounce its evil foundations.
5) The official Soviet was run by a pampered elite, exempt from the ramifications of its own radical socialist ideologies. So too woke Silicon Valley billionaires talk socialistically but live royally. Coke and Delta Airlines CEOs who hector Americans on their illiberality respectively make over $16 million a year.
What unites current woke activists like Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Obamas are their huge estates and their multimillion-dollar wealth. Just as the select few of the old Soviet nomenklatura had their Black Sea dachas, so our loudest top-down revolutionaries prefer living in Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills, Montecito, and Malibu.
6) The Soviets mastered Trotskyization, or the rewriting and airbrushing away of history to fabricate present reality. Are Americans any different when they indulge in a frenzy of name changing, nighttime statue toppling, monument defacing, book banning, and “cancellation”?
7) The Soviets created a climate of fear and rewarded stool pigeons to root and rat out all potential enemies of the people. Since when did Americans encourage coworkers to turn in others for an ill-considered word in a private conversation? Why do thousands now scour the internet to find any past incorrect expression of a competitor, rival, or opponent? Why are there now new thought criminals supposedly guilty of climate racism, immigration racism, vaccination racism, and almost anything racism?
8) Soviet law, state prosecutors, and courts were weaponized according to ideology. In America, where and for what reason you riot determines whether you face any legal consequences. Politically correct sanctuary cities with impunity defy the law. Jury members are terrified of being doxxed and hunted down for an incorrect verdict. The CIA and FBI are becoming as ideological as the old KGB.
9) The Soviets doled out prizes on the basis of correct Soviet thought. In America now most concede that Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and Oscar awards or Pulitzer Prizes do not reflect the year’s best television show, song, play, movie, or book—rather than the most politically correct production from the most woke.
10) The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom. Instead, they boasted they were advocates of equity, champions of the underclass, enemies of privilege, and therefore could terminate anyone or anything they pleased.
Our wokeists are similarly defending their thought-control efforts, forced reeducation sessions, scripted confessionals, mandatory apologies, Trotskyization of our past, and cancel culture on the pretense that we need long overdue “fundamental transformation.”
So if they destroy people in the name of equity, then their nihilism is justified.
Leftists Deny Hating America; They Just Want To Fix It
Never
tell a leftist they hate America. They will correct you every time.
They don’t hate America, they’ll tell you; they just want to improve it.
They just want to help make it better. They just want America to live
up to her ideals.
No, it’s not America per se that
they hate, but rather the things that made America so spectacular in
the first place. Free enterprise. Limited government. Federalism.
Separation of Powers. Individual freedom.
But,
while they don’t hate America, it is, according to them, racist,
sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, intolerant, and more. In addition, the
Constitution is an outdated document that old racist White guys wrote,
and it needs to be reimagined.
So,
okay, sure, I’ll buy that leftists don’t technically hate America.
Indeed, consider that, even when they have Hollywood or Silicon Valley
or Wall Street type money and could live anywhere in the world...big
surprise, they never actually leave!
When
I tell leftists that America is the greatest nation that’s ever
existed, it seems to send them over some sort of cliff. They often get
angry and look at me as if I just told them the earth is flat. But the
funny thing is that when I ask what nation is better or empire was
better...crickets. They immediately launch into a polemic about how
America is racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, etc. It’s ripe with
inequality, inequity and rich White men run it. And not to be
forgotten, its Constitution is an outdated document that old White
racist guys wrote and, as such, shouldn’t control our lives today.
Then
I suggest that even if it were the case that America was the hellscape
they suggest, where should we go to escape it? Again, crickets.
Even
though leftist snowflakes can’t point to a single place on earth or in
history that is, or was, superior to the United States, or that had or
has a more successful combination of prosperity and freedom than the US,
they most certainly have an endless supply of ways to improve it:
Bans on hate speech, which they define as anything that hurts anyone’s feelings.
Defund the police.
Pack the Supreme Court.
Disband the INS.
$15 minimum wage.
Demonize the Founding Fathers.
Eliminate the Electoral College.
Cancel anyone who ever uttered an opinion that doesn’t comport with the currently favored position on any given subject.
Eliminate academic requirements and standardized testing for entrance into college.
Universal healthcare
Free college tuition
Green energy mandates and subsidies
Eliminate fossil fuels
Repeal the Second Amendment
Eliminate capitalism.
Eliminate the binary gender construct
Make the Pentagon the bleeding edge for social experiments
Tax the rich
Forgive student debt
Mandate vaccinations
And the list goes on, and on, and on. It literally never stops. Griswold v. Connecticut begat Roe vs. Wade which
begat partial-birth abortion. Gay rights turned into civil unions
turned into gay marriage. Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act
turned into coerced lax lending standards which turned into the housing
crash. And the Americans with Disabilities Act started out as compassion
for the handicapped and mutated into a vehicle for extortion of small
businesses by a cabal of pernicious lawyers. Removing the Confederate
Battle Flag from state flags led to pulling down statues of Abraham
Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas to canceling Dr. Seuss and Aunt Jemima.
At
what point, exactly, will America cease to be the racist sexist
hellhole that the left tells us it is? Must the military perfectly
reflect the hue and sex of America itself? Must corporate executives be
promoted based on their socioeconomic heritage?
What
else needs to be reflective of the demographics of the American
populace? How about the NBA and the NFL? Black men make up 74% of the
NBA and 70% of the NFL. Do we fire 90% of them to hire more White men
and women of every race? Would that make the games more competitive,
more exciting? Probably not.
Or
how about nurses? 93% of nurses are women. Should 40% of them be fired
to hire men to make the industry reflective of the rest of the country?
Would that make healthcare better or patients happier and safer?
Unlikely.
This
could go on endlessly for every area of the economy: Ditch diggers.
Sanitation workers. Teachers. Barbers. Rap artists. Surgeons. Lawyers.
The
bottom line is the left knows how to do one thing well, and that is to
destroy what someone else built. We’ve seen that play out across America
time and again. From the burnt husks of Detroit and Washington that
rotted for decades following the riots of the 1960s to turning
once-great American cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles into giant
homeless camps strewn with needles and feces to the economic
devastation wrought in cities like Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle
from a year of “mostly peaceful protests.”
When
the left comes to power in successful cities, the march to a real
hellscape begins. And it’s not just cities. The left broke the Boy
Scouts, they destroyed the NFL as a truly national form of
entertainment, they’ve ruined Disney and Marvel, and they are in the
process of destroying women’s sports.
Dennis
Prager often says, “The Left destroys everything it touches” and he’s
right. The left has never built a nation that millions of people risk
their lives to enter. The left has never built a society where freedom
of thought, speech, and the press have thrived. The left has never built
an economic juggernaut founded on free markets or anything else.
The
left can do nothing more than take advantage of the freedom and
prosperity that others have created and throw stones at it for its
imperfections. Voltaire was prescient when he observed, “Perfect is the
enemy of the good.”
America
is no doubt imperfect. It is flawed and sometimes unfair and often
inequitable… but mankind is all imperfect. All of God’s creations are.
The reality is, the United States is by far the greatest nation God has
seen fit to grace man with and, while it will continue to be imperfect
until the end of days, it is nothing like the racist, fascist hellscape
the left makes it out to be.
But
of course, none of that matters because, for the left, building
something great is never a necessity; in fact, it’s never even a
consideration. Why bother trying to build anything when it’s so much
easier to throw stones at those who are too busy actually building
things to notice they’re being targeted for their imperfections by those
who don’t have the courage to try.
I’m
not sure what the textbook definition of “hate for ones country” might
be but everything the left does and says most certainly looks like it --
which makes one think of the old saying: “If it looks like a duck,
sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”
In the past couple of months, our esteemed public health experts have had a rough go of defending the supposedly settled science behind lockdowns and mask mandates.
White House covid-19 advisor Andy Slavitt was first on the chopping block back in mid-February, when he was reduced to parroting empty platitudes about social distancing after failing to explain why a completely open Florida had numbers no worse than a strictly locked-down California. Then comes media darling Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has had a particularly embarrassing series of public appearances of late. During a recent MSNBC interview Fauci expressed confusion and wasn't "quite sure" as to why Texas was experiencing falling cases and deaths an entire month after lifting its mask mandates and capacity restrictions. Moreover, during a hearing with Representative Jim Jordan, Fauci completely dodgedJordan's question of why Texas has lower case rates than some of the most notable lockdown states. Fauci, refusing to answer the question, simply responded that having a lockdown is not the same thing as obeying lockdowns. Fauci was correct here, but he indirectly claimed that citizens of New York and New Jersey, two notorious lockdown states, were complying less with mitigation measures than a state that had, and still has, practically none. A quick check of Google's covid-19 mobility reports lays this counterintuitive claim to rest.
The American Media's Agenda
When governments and media outlets around the world have successfully captured audiences by stoking fear of covid-19, the data that should so easily assuage this fear become irrelevant, and interviews like those mentioned above are simply brushed aside in favor of a fear-born allegiance to the "morally superior" government-mandated lockdowns, curfews, mask mandates, and more. This "scared straight" approach, as Bill Maher correctly described it, is the state's bludgeon of compliance.
As far as scaring citizens straight, Project Veritas has released footage showing CNN employees explaining how the network plays up the covid-19 death toll to drive numbers. Especially disgraceful was CNN technical director Charlie Chester's admission that the network doesn't like to report recovery rates because "[t]hat's not scary…. If it bleeds it leads."
CNN isn't alone in the fearmongering business. Thanks to the surplus of United States media outlets willing to churn up a disproportionate amount of negative covid-19 headlines—roughly 90 percent of covid-19 news in the United States is negative compared to 51 percent internationally—is it any surprise that nearly 70 percent of Democrats, 51 percent of Republicans, and almost 50 percent of independents think the chances of being hospitalized with covid-19 range anywhere from 20 percent to over 50 percent?
Where's the Correlation?
Government- and media-induced panic have blinded us to the data, which for the past thirteen months have consistently shown zero correlation between the timing, strength, and duration of mitigation measures and covid-19 incidence. Nowhere could this lack of correlation be more prevalent than among lockdowns and mask usage.
Leaving aside the disastrous and deadly consequences of government lockdowns—see here, here, and here—the evidence for lockdowns' ability to mitigate covid-19 mortality remains scant.
Looking at the United States, we can address the widely believed notion that states with more intense lockdowns will see fewer covid-19 deaths by plotting each state's average restriction ranking over the past thirteen months against the total number of covid-19 deaths for each state. To get the average ranking, the author averaged data from Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government—this source ranked each state by the average time spent at a stringency index measure greater than sixty up until mid-December 2020—and WalletHub, which also ranked each state by stringency using a weighted average of various measures from January 2021 onward. Now, if the past year's worth of sanctimonious lectures from public health experts have any scientific weight behind them, we should see a very strong negative correlation between the intensity of states' restrictions and total covid-19 deaths.
Source: Data on deaths (as of Apr. 28, 2021) from the NYTimes Covid-19 Data Bot. Data on restriction rankings from the NYTimes Covid-19 Data Bot (through December 2020); Adam McCann, "States with the Fewest Coronavirus Restrictions," WalletHub, Apr. 6, 2021 (since January 2021); and Laura Hallas, Ariq Hatibie, Saptarshi Majumdar, Monika Pyarali, and Thomas Hale, "Variation in US States’ Responses to COVID-19" (Blavatnik School of Government Working Paper No. BSG-WP-2020/034, December 2020).
Contrary to what the public health experts have been telling us for more than a year, there is no correlation between the strength of a state's lockdown measures and total covid-19 deaths. In fact, notorious lockdown states such as New York and New Jersey have some of the worst mortality numbers to date. To blame noncompliance for these poor numbers is ridiculous on its face considering that states with no restrictions, such as Texas and Florida, have far fewer deaths than New York and New Jersey. In fact, you'll find that every state that has either removed its mask mandate or all covid-19 restrictions entirely is outperforming New York and New Jersey in terms of deaths.
The same lack of correlation can be seen when comparing average lockdown stringency with the total number of patients hospitalized who have suspected or confirmed covid-19. As a point of clarification, the author summed the current number of patients hospitalized each day to arrive at the total number of patients hospitalized. This will result in slightly inflated total numbers, since patients may spend more than one day in the hospital, but having applied the same aggregation method across all states, the total hospitalization metric still provides an accurate assessment of covid-19 hospitalizations in each state.
Source: Data on hospitalizations (as of Apr. 24, 2021) from the US Department of Health and Human Services. Data on restriction rankings from the NYTimes Covid-19 Data Bot (through December 2020); Adam McCann, "States with the Fewest Coronavirus Restrictions," WalletHub, Apr. 6, 2021 (since January 2021); and Laura Hallas, Ariq Hatibie, Saptarshi Majumdar, Monika Pyarali, and Thomas Hale, "Variation in US States’ Responses to COVID-19" (Blavatnik School of Government Working Paper No. BSG-WP-2020/034, December 2020).
Internationally speaking, the data continue to expose lockdowns as the single greatest public health failure in human history. Plotting lockdown stringency against total covid-19 death toll reveals, yet again, zero correlation between the two variables.
Source: Data on deaths (as of Apr. 28, 2021) and lockdown stringency (as of Apr. 28, 2021) from Our World in Data.
In light of a year's worth of data showing wildly different mortality and hospitalization outcomes for fifty states with fifty very different lockdown stringencies, as well as drastically different mortality outcomes for 166 countries with 166 different lockdown stringencies, one can only marvel that such a deadly and ineffective policy can be recommended by public health experts.
If the lockdowns failed to mitigate the spread of covid-19 in the United States just as in dozens of countries around the world—remember, the lockdowns fail without even taking their costs into account—it's possible that mask usage is the missing piece of the mitigation puzzle.
It wouldn't be fair to the reader to post quite literally hundreds of charts that show the exact opposite outcomes the media would have one expect after regions remove or institute mask mandates—Ian Miller has done more work in this area than anybody else. It also wouldn't be fair to claim that mask mandates and mask usage are synonymous. However, based on reactions to states lifting their mask mandates, I don't think any proponent of mask wearing would seriously expect the same level of mask usage should mandates be lifted. Nevertheless, the claim that mask usagenegatively correlates with cases and deaths is easily refuted with a quick look at the data. Given the data available, we'll again only be looking at the fifty states.
Source: Data for cases and deaths (as of Apr. 28, 2021) from the NYTimes Covid-19 Data Bot. Mask usage data from the Delphi Group's COVIDcast.
Even though the trend lines travel in the exact opposite direction of what our public health experts would have us expect, the correlations are statistically meaningless. Note that the above chart only covers the 2.5-month period starting February 9, 2021, which is when COVIDcast began reporting mask usage numbers for each state. Therefore, the author included only the cases and deaths that occurred during this 2.5-month period. Despite this truncated time period, 2.5 months should have been more than enough to have exposed any sort of meaningful correlation between mask usage and both cases and deaths.
It is worth noting that Rhode Island and New York, each with some of the highest mask usage rates and lockdown stringencies in the country, are leading the pack with some of the largest case increases since early February. What is more, in the 2.5 months since early February the ten states with the highest rate of mask usage have been doing worse in both cases and deaths than the ten states with the lowest rate of mask usage.
Source: Data for cases and deaths (as of Apr. 28, 2021) from the NYTimes Covid-19 Data Bot. Mask usage data from the Delphi Group's COVIDcast.
Remember, we aren't measuring the amount of rules that simply say you have to wear a mask. What's being measured is the percentage of people actually wearing masks in public in each state. It's quite difficult to look at the trends depicted above and make the case not only for continuing mask mandates, but wearing masks at all.
Some may have an issue with the fact that the trends above only cover the couple of months since February. Let's assume, for the sake of a more complete picture, that mask usage trends were consistent for each state since the start of the pandemic. We can also expand our filter to the top and bottom fifteen states to account for some states' movement in and out of the top and bottom ten states.
Source: Data for cases and deaths (as of Apr. 28, 2021) from the NYTimes Covid-19 Data Bot. Mask usage data from the Delphi Group's COVIDcast.
In terms of cases, from April to around mid-June, states with the lowest rates of mask usage were outperforming states with the highest rates of mask usage. This trend reversed from mid-June through mid-January and then reversed again in favor of states with the lowest rate of mask usage.
In terms of deaths, states with the lowest rates of mask usage outperformed states with the highest rates of mask usage from April until mid-July. From mid-July to mid-February, death trends were more favorable to states with the highest rates of mask usage, but after mid-February death trends again became more favorable to states with the lowest rates of mask usage. Again, if we are assuming fairly consistent rates of mask usage across the entire duration of the pandemic while also assuming that the science behind masks is truly settled, it's quite difficult to explain away any period of time in which states with the lowest rates of mask usage were outperforming states with the highest rates.
The supposedly settled science behind both lockdowns and mask mandates has always been in serious trouble but is even more so now. Completely leaving aside the incredible death toll of the lockdowns, their numerous social and psychological costs, the totalitarian denial of our most basic liberties, and the decimation of tens of thousands of small businesses, they would still be a miserable failure by nearly every covid-19 metric we have available. Though, to be fair, the lockdowns did make our cities quieter. But aside from that, the data continue to deny that either lockdowns or mask mandates are effective tools for mitigating the spread of covid-19.
Anthony graduated from Grove City College in 2018 with a B.A. in Economics. He has been a student of the Austrian School of Economics for over 8 years and a champion of Rothbardian libertarianism. During the day, Anthony works as a Software Quality Analyst for an ERP software company.
One of the great schisms in conservatism and GOP politics - a key difference between passive and active conservatism, peacetime vs. wartime - is whether or not the Left is credited with having good intentions. The Left, of course, never reciprocates this concession.
Unfortunately, the Left is dedicated to attacking the very moral and philosophical pillars of the American republic and Western civilization, and they utterly dominate culture and academia, so conceding good intentions is a zero-sum game.
This is why so many GOP politicians and conservative pundits are of little use in pitched political battle, or eagerly turn against other conservatives. Having conceded the good intentions of the Left, they have also tacitly agreed to question the intentions of their own side.
Some of the more absurd pronouncements of NeverTrump types over the past few years can be viewed in this light. They made their peace with left-wing radicalism and do what they can to apologize for it. They internalize the Left's critique of less pliable conservatives.
Some of this is cynical self-interest, a desire to keep booking options open in Left-dominated media, to remain marketable as a "acceptable conservative" who politely critiques the dominant left-wing ideology without seriously threatening it.
Some of this is cultural, a consequence of living in the Beltway, coastal media hubs, or academic strongholds and inheriting their assumptions about the Deplorables out in flyover country. Some is personal, as friendships are made with influential left-wingers.
Whatever the reasons, it all boils down to that fundamental concession that the Left means well, that its civilization-destroying agenda is somehow justified or understandable, that its policy ideas might be a little wrong-headed but its heart is in the right place.
That wouldn't be so bad if the sentiment was reciprocated - but it most certainly is not. Not even a little. The Left institutionally believes that all conservative ideas, all resistance to the progressive agenda, is evil. They routinely question the humanity of opponents.
That's why the Left is fluent at using populism, while the Right was bullied and intimidated into disdaining it. The Left speaks with the utter conviction of a perpetual moral crusade, treating politics like a religion. Its enemies are devils and sinners, dissent is sacrilege.
The Left wins by any means necessary and uses compulsive force to shape politics. If they lose a battle, it's because evil forces lied and cheated, and it's only a temporary setback. You can't maintain that worldview while conceding your opponents are good people who mean well.
Passive conservatives accept the Left's moral framework, abandoning the most important momentum-shifting battles as irrevocably lost, and focus on a few policy quibbles that can be debated without challenging the Left's core premises.
They speak of wanting what the Left wants, but having different ideas about the best way to get there. They are fluent in the language of the Left and accept its judgments about which people, ideas, and tactics are out of bounds for the Right. They see no hills worth dying on.
Having conceded righteousness to the Left, they can imagine no righteous conservative crusade, no uncompromising conservative position, nothing that would shift the momentum of politics away from its perpetual swing to the Left. Everything the Right holds is negotiable.
"Standing athwart history and yelling stop" meant something very different at the beginning of that history. Decades on, it means yelling stop instead of DOING anything that would stop it. The difference between argument and action is belief in your own intentions. /end
On February 3, 2021, in the wake of the “deadly events” of 1/6, Biden’s new Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a 60-day stand-down and total purge of the U.S. military’s rampant, undefined “extremism” problem. Though the details of this purge were always kept vague and framed in apolitical terms, it was immediately obvious the target would be MAGA — with the buzzword “extremism” tagged onto various proxies for Trump supporters, conservatives, and opponents of globalism of all stripes.
We now know the hatchet man the Pentagon has selected to carry out this MAGA purge of the American defense forces, and the entire operation is worse than you could have ever imagined.
The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military.
This hatchet man’s name is Bishop Garrison, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense for Diversity and Inclusion:
Garrison says that being a Trump supporter makes you a racist, misogynist, extremist.
In a tweet thread from July 27, 2019, Bishop Garrisonwrote:
This isn’t just some random case of Trump Derangement Syndrome on Twitter.
Just as the Defense Secretary’s 60 day stand down to take stock of “extremism” within the military’s ranks expired, the Pentagon issued a formal memo on April 9th describing its “Immediate Actions to Counter Extremism.” This memo establishes the Countering Extremism Working Group (“CEWG”) to develop and implement all “Counter Extremism” policies at the Pentagon.
Bishop Garrison is at the helm.
From the memo:
The [CEWG’s] immediate actions are as follows:
Review and Update of DODI 1325.06 Extremism Definition: Office of the Secretary of Defense (Personnel & Readiness) and the Office of the General Counsel (OGC) will review and update DODI 1325.06 to more specifically define what constitutes extremist behavior.
Updating the Service Member Transition Checklist: The military departments will add provisions to their service member transition checklists that include training on potential targeting of service members by extremist groups and work with other federal departments agencies to create a mechanism by which veterans have the opportunity to report any potential contact with an extremist group should they choose to do so.
Review and Standardization of Screening Questionnaires: All military departments to update and standardize screening questionnaires to solicit specific information about current or previous extremist behavior.
Commission of Extremism Study: The Department will commission a study on extremist behavior within our Total Force, to include gaining greater fidelity on the scope of the problem.
Led by Bishop Garrison, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense on Human Capital and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the CEWG will oversee the implementation of immediate actions as well as the development of mid-term and long-term recommendations for the continued engagement of this issue. The CEWG will report through the Workforce Management Group (WMG) to the Deputy’s Workforce Council (DWC). [U.S. Department of Defense]
From the above, we learn that Bishop Garrison will lead the CEWG, which will function as a de facto “Opinion Police” for Pentagon personnel on a permanent, go-forward basis.
The CEWG’s first tasks will be: to change the Pentagon’s definition of “extremism”; to stop Pentagon personnel from being recruited by “extremist” groups; and to beef up personnel screening to better detect hidden “extremist beliefs.”
But what exactly are “extremist beliefs” and “extremist materials”?
A leaked 17-page DARPA memo from March 27, 2021 entitled “Extremism and Insider Threat in the DoD” provides a clue as to what new categories of lawful thoughts, associations and reading materials are likely to be scanned and banned by Bishop Garrison’s CEWG. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency colloquially known as “The Pentagon’s Brain,” recommended a brand new category called “Patriot Extremism,” which occurs when a citizen believes “the US government has become corrupt” or “has overstepped its constitutional boundaries”:
“Patriot Extremism” is completely distinct from “White supremacy,” which DARPA maintains as a wholly separate category. To DARPA’s credit, they did at least add a new category for “Anarchist Extremism,” which purports to target some degree of left-wing political organization. But DARPA’s “Symbols of Extremism” collage on page 6 clearly reveals their intended target: the collage includes 12 “far-right” symbols, versus just two Antifa symbols, and just one for ISIS. “Extremist” “far-right” symbols include Pepe the Frog, the OK hand gesture, “Come and Take It” guns-rights memes, and the “Q” in QAnon:
So now it’s up to Bishop Garrison’s CEWG to take DARPA’s “extremism” proposals and either implement them, throw them in the trash, or come up with something new.
We already have a good idea of Bishop Garrison’s views from the egregious anti-Trump tweets presented above.
But since Bishop Garrison will effectively be the vetter-in-chief responsible for culling the entire U.S. military of any potential “extremist” in its ranks, it’s only fair that Bishop Garrison’s own “extremist” Internet footprint be more thoroughly exposed — and with it the entire sham of his dangerous project to politicize and purge America’s defense forces.
The Critical Race Theory Zealot
Bishop Garrison is an ardent advocate of the so-called “1619 Project.” In August 2019, he instructed his followers to stop whatever they were doing and read 1619‘s 100-page spread in the Sunday Times immediately.
Recall that the “1619” in the 1619 Project refers to the year in which the first slaves arrived at the British Colonies. Spearheaded by the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah Jones, the idea of the 1619 Project is to replace 1776 with 1619 as the year of America’s founding, with a view toward casting the U.S. as fundamentally evil and unjust. The New York Post explains “How the 1619 Project Slandered America”:
In the absence of traditional public examinations this time of year, as a result of you know what, here’s a little history quiz for you. What year marked the creation of the United States?
Most of you will probably answer 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. Credit might also be given if you said 1788, the date of the ratification of the Constitution.
You’d all be wrong. The correct date, apparently, is 1619.
This was the year the first slaves arrived in the British colonies of North America, and if the people who control most of the cultural conversation in America these days get their way, we should all see this as the true moment of the founding of the nation. The point, of course, is that it defines America as a nation built not on the lofty ideals of freedom and self-government laid out in the document written by the Founding Fathers, but as one built on the degradation, dehumanization and persecution of black people. [NY Post]
The 1619 Project is not simply critical of certain aspects of American history. Rather, it recasts and redefines America as fundamentally evil, and is therefore anti-American in this most direct and literal sense. The 1619 agenda is so controversial that Republicans in 5 states sought to ban schools from incorporating its anti-American poison in their curricula. Even Mitch McConnell, hardly the brave culture warrior, piped up to address the 1619 Project’s anti-American slander.
So vicious and subversive is the 1619 Project’s slander of America that one of Donald Trump’s last actions as President was to set up a 1776 Commission dedicated to correcting its damaging lies about what America fundamentally is. Of course, Biden made sure to do away with this just days after taking office.
As a final confirmation of the anti-white, anti-American agenda behind the 1619 Project, its founder Nikole Hannah-Jones was revealed to have referred to the “white race” as “bloodsuckers” and “barbaric devils,” and Christopher Columbus as “no different than Hitler.”
Such is the nature of the 1619 Project that Bishop Garrison, ideological vetter-in-chief for the United States military, promoted so enthusiastically as “stories we all need to hear.”
The most generous and willfully blind might write off Bishop Garrison’s promotion of the 1619 Project as an extraneous interest that wouldn’t have an effect on his current definition of “extremism” or on his present role in vetting extremism from the U.S. Armed Forces. Think again.
In an August 2019 screed entitled “Racism is an existential threat“, Bishop Garrison directly connects his support for the 1619 Project to his conception of “white nationalist extremism” as the pre-eminent security threat facing the United States:
The country’s horrific history on race and its continued refusal to engage these problems head-on has exacerbated the issue to the point of a violent crisis. This crisis continues to seep into our state and local domestic policies, our technologies, the algorithms of social media companies, and (potentially) our future like a corrosive poison contaminating a water table. We will continue to face the nation-ending threat of white supremacy and white nationalist extremism unless we invest in Combating Violent Extremism (CVE) programs, which this administration has cut, and find the courage to have honest-to-God difficult, uncomfortable conversations in our homes and communities about our history of race and privilege in America and how it has shaped our lives today.
An example of this in practice is the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, a series of opinion pieces, poetry, essays, and historical works designed to inform readers on the treatment and history of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws in America. The project’s title comes from the August anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves, 20-30 individuals from what is now modern-day Angola, in the British American colonies. Each work highlights not only past atrocities and injustices experienced by black Americans, but ongoing systemic issues that have plagued the nation from its original sin of slavery into the present day. It’s an important effort that may very well shape the dialogue around race, inclusion, and the need for steadfast policies that may one day fill the discriminatory gaps in our society and help heal the country. And the effort is, somehow, in 2019, controversial.
While pundits clutch pearls and attempt to convince us that the 1619 Project is a lie, that it’s really white society under attack, and that we’re in a post-racial society because we once had a black man as president, more radicalized white supremacists will shoot up schools, markets, stores, and places of worship to assert their ideology. We are not required to blindly believe pundits. We must not be bullied by maniacs who seek power through semi-automatic rifles. We must not run from engagement with each other; the change we desire can be achieved through heartfelt, frequently difficult, and awkward conversations among family, friends, and neighbors about race and its continued impact on our lives. Reading the 1619 Project is a good place to start. [InkStickMedia]
When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a speech denouncing 1619 for the ahistorical anti-American poison that it is, Bishop Garrison labeled Pompeo’s criticisms not merely a different opinion, but “dangerous.”
Let’s take a moment to take stock of what we’ve learned. The leader of the Pentagon’s Orwellian ideological vetting operation not only enthusiastically promotes the viciously anti-American 1619 Project, he characterizes anyone who would dare criticize it as “dangerous.”
The brave patriots who serve in the U.S. military are required to take an oath to the Constitution. But if Bishop Garrison has his way (and given his current position, it looks like he will) only those who believe America is a fundamentally evil and racist nation will be permitted to take the oath to defend America — a bizarre dystopian twist if there ever was one!
Contextualizing contrary opinions as “dangerous” is especially troubling in light of Bishop Garrison’s grift in the national security sector. By designating lawful groups, people, associations or ideas as “dangerous,” a national security predicate is created to eliminate them. Since the national security apparatus controls the commanding heights of America’s intelligence agencies (which are functionally above the law under NSC 10-2), military branches, State Department diplomats, Treasury Department powers and Federal law enforcement organs, national security predicates are the ultimate “trump card” to bypass democratic processes.
Put another way, if every issue were a national security issue, we would have martial law, not a Constitutional republic.
This undemocratic override is why national security apparatchiks are supposed to stay in their lane, focus on defense, and stay out of civilian policy. Labeling a target a “threat to national security” not only moots civilian debate, it moots all FOIAs and public inquiries into what military-intelligence is even up to behind closed doors.
But Bishop Garrison, the ultimate vassal for an agenda he is likely wholly unaware of, seeks long-arm jurisdiction for the U.S. security state on all things “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Which leads us to Bishop Garrison’s main grift in the critical race theory racket: “White Supremacy is a national security threat.“
On December 10, 2019, Bishop Garrison testified at a House Armed Services Committee hearing titled “Diversity in Recruiting and Retention: Increasing Diversity in the Military – What the Military Services are Doing”.
The transcript reads, in relevant part:
[P]romoting inclusivity and respect within the ranks is not only the right thing to do morally but also a matter of national security: a more cohesive unit is a stronger fighting force. Moreover, in order to address a diverse set of threats across the globe, we must strive to include a diverse set of life experiences and perspectives…
It’s also important to note that some of the current discourse in American society and some of the current administration’s policies could be affecting interest in serving, especially among minorities. The militarization of our nation’s southern border; the deportation of veterans; the potential rescission of the Parole in Place program; tenuous status of Dreamer service members and veterans; the transgender service ban; the fact that many major military bases are still named after Confederate leaders; the ongoing worries about white nationalism in the military’s ranks; and the fact that an individual who holds extreme views on race, continues to serve at the highest level of immigration policy-making—these factors risk causing a detrimental impact on our military’s ability to recruit and retain new and diverse talent. [YouTube]
By “an individual who holds extreme views on race who continues to serve at the highest level of immigration policy-making,” Bishop Garrison meant then White House Senior Policy Advisor, Stephen Miller.
To Bishop Garrison, people like Stephen Miller are not legitimate officials with mere opinion or policy differences that should be resolved at the civilian level: they are national security threats that should be dealt with at the military level. So says the new head of the Pentagon Opinion Police.
But Bishop Garrison’s sleight of hand reasoning here is so clever, so understated, and yet so breathtakingly sweeping that it’s unlikely he had anything to do with inventing it.
Here’s how the scam works:
Once you accept that the Pentagon’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies are a matter of national security, then anything that undermines diversity, equity and inclusion is now deemed a national security threat. That’s all it takes for the empty vessel of Bishop Garrison to sweep all policies and personnel that supported Donald Trump’s border wall, illegal alien deportations, DACA criticism, transgender military ban, and military bases named after Confederate leaders into “threats to national security” jurisdiction.
In short, critical race theory is no longer just the poison academics use to train American schoolchildren to hate their country — it is the animating agenda of the United States Military, the most powerful fighting force in world history.
Bishop Garrison’s public remarks on George Floyd offer a shocking and terrifying glimpse into what this means in practice.
At the height of the George Floyd riots in June 2020, Garrison penned “An Appeal to the National Security Community to Fight Racial Injustice,” in which he argues “there is no security abroad without justice at home.” In the op-ed, Garrison crusaded against the very concept of objectivity in the U.S. national security state and called for the national security apparatus to “cut out” the “cancer” of racism.
It is a convention in national security analysis to strike as objective a tone as possible. Experts who focus on how inequality and injustice undermine security are often taken less seriously than those who focus on weapons development or military strategy. This, too, reflects the structural tunnel vision in our community that has to change. In this spirit, if we are not all actively aware of how racial injustice undermines our security and if we do not integrate efforts to combat it into our work and policy initiatives, then we will be part of the problem and guilty of undercutting our own security.
The United States faces a historic moment that provides an opportunity for the national security community to both discuss and act on the issues of race and extremism—and how they affect our security, diplomatic relationships, and credibility abroad. The racism that threatens lives and security will not magically vanish. It will not draw back or resolve itself. It must be cut out like the cancer it has been for so long. The national security community can strengthen the nation of which it is a part by being not just an ally of those who want change, but also an active participant in this dialogue and effort. The battles for the security and moral authority of the United States are intrinsically linked. [Foreign Policy]
Actually, worse than nothing. Instead of similarly pursuing BLM as a national security threat, Bishop Garrison attacked “the deafening silence of veteran service organizations” who failed to support BLM.
According to Biship Garrison, anything that falls outside of the ideological boundaries of an MSNBC host is not only wrong, but a national security threat.
Consider Bishop Garrison’s tweet below calling Bill Maher a racist. Bill Maher can now be banned for life from all U.S. military organs. Not for being insensitive (which is First Amendment-protected speech), but because Bill Maher is now a national security threat because he made a joke (below) undermining racial minority recruitment, retention, leadership, and morale.
By the same logic, Revolver News could now be deemed a national security threat by publishing this article, justifying counterintelligence countermeasures such as surveillance and infiltration. Ironically, these are exactly the types of abuses that initially prompted the 1975-76 Church Committee hearings, after Christopher Pyle’s 1970 whistleblower series revealed Army Counterintelligence and the FBI had been spying on every major civilian political movement in the country, including ordinary women’s groups.
Bishop Garrison is thus the ultimate weapon for ending all First Amendment protections afforded to military personnel and civilians in the modern era. His Pentagon Opinion Police may now use critical race theory to implement a parallel and superseding Constitution. It is the military-intelligence equivalent of Christopher Caldwell’s “The Law That Ate The Constitution.”
In December 2019, Bishop Garrison condemned that Rep. Pete Aguilar’s “Preventing Radical Extremist’s Violent Endeavors Now and Tomorrow Act of 2019” bill even used the word “extremist” at all. The image in the below tweet juxtaposes Rep. Aguilar’s version and the version that made it to President Trump’s desk. Bishop Garrison is clearly dismayed “Whiteness” is no longer the sole, exclusive, head-on target of the Pentagon purge.
There is a second bit of sleight of hand at play. That is Bishop Garrison’s conflation of violent and non-violent “white supremacy” threats to create his national security predicate.
In an August 2020 audio interview titled “What does white supremacy mean for US national security?” with Public Radio International’s The World, Bishop Garrison elucidates to host Carol Hills:
Interviewer: Bishop, in your years first in the Army and then in national security roles, what experiences did you have that convinced you that systemic racism can undermine national security?
Bishop Garrison: Well the biggest things I’ve witnessed thus far is just the predominance of White supremacy, of the continued rise of it, particularly here in recent years, as we’ve had opportunities to engage it directly. But we’re also seeing internationally, kind of across the world in authoritarian regimes, a resurgence of these types of hate speech, of violent action and rhetoric directed at vulnerable communities, particularly minority communities, communities of color.
So and this is something that just didn’t happen within the last few months or few years. This has taken some time over the last decade plus to persist, and as much we’ve just seen a lack of proper engagement on it. Sothis is something that is going to take the totality of the national security apparatus to engage. I’m hoping we’re going to have an opportunity to do so soon. [PRI]
There are three remarkable features about Garrison’s response. First, Bishop has no “experiences” to list in response to Hills’s question of what evidence he has of “system racism.” All he can do is point to “just the predominance of White supremacy.” No data, no definition, no explanation necessary.
Second, he pivots to a lackluster reference to “international” “authoritarian regimes” where “hate speech” targets “communities of color.” Given that White people make up less than 10% of the world’s population, and the vast majority of Whites live in Western democracies not deemed “authoritarian” by the State Department, this mush-mouthed garble appears to conflate two left-wing bugaboos: rising populism in Western democracies with so-called “hate speech,” and a deranged new left-wing pretext for hybrid war in Eurasia on the grounds of Russia’s new and emerging export of “transnational white supremacy.”
Third, note that according to Garrison “the totality of the national security apparatus” must be turned against American servicemen to purge this existential threat, while no actual threat has been identified. The interview continues:
Interviewer: Can you name some experiences or instances that you experienced directly that you feel were missed opportunities or that were simply ignored or not engaged upon.
Bishop Garrison: No, for me, my own personal experiences, the biggest things have been more about inherent bias, and underlying prejudice. I’ve never had anyone directly engage me and call me an outright racist name. I’ve never had anyone attack me based on any immutable traits. What I will say is I’ve walked into more than one room and been the only African-American to speak on a variety of issues in professional settings. [PRI]
It’s truly amazing. This self-described “national security expert” whose 24/7 calling card is racism’s “nation-ending” threat has never actually experienced a single actual, overt act of racism.
Of course, this is diametrically opposed to the the oppressed, put-upon act Bishop Garrison deploys on Twitter. In December 2019, Bishop Garrison wildly slandered a cadet simply playing “the circle game” as embodying the “white nationalism & supremacy” Bishop Garrison is tasked with eradicating:
When corrected by a Twitter user that the cadet was obviously just playing “the circle game” and Bishop Garrison’s hair-trigger racism cry was going to destroy the cadet’s career, Bishop Garrison shot back: “I know first-hand racism.”
But “first hand racism” is the opposite of what Bishop Garrison knows. By his own account, no one was ever actually racist to him.
Still, shoot-first, see-if-they’re-racist-later Bishop Garrison translated his fake oppression into a caution against “attempts to wash this away as a ‘game'” because “I can tell you, history may say otherwise.”
As seems to happen literally every single time (much more on that below), history sides against Bishop Garrison and with the accused racist. The military investigation confirmed the cadet was just playing “the circle game,” not doing a White Power racial insurrectionist dog-whistle. No apology was forthcoming from Bishop, of course.
Garrison’s August 20, 2020 Public Radio International interview concludes:
Interviewer: How does racism fit into the larger context of threats to national security?
Bishop Garrison: So, the biggest thing we’re seeing right now is violent White extremism, White supremacists. They see their race, and they see themselves as the White race, they see themselves as naturally above other people, within the world. We’re starting to see them act out in violent ways. We’ve had more mass shootings with affiliations to that particular demographic than we’ve had to international terrorism. So having these types of thoughts, having them perpetuated, and even still, having high-level individuals who are pushing these kinds of thoughts through policy and through rhetoric, only enabling these folks that are going to go out and act in aggressive, violent manners to do so. [PRI]
Now, finally, we come to an actual security issue. But his justification is mass shootings!
This is a totally garbage, indefensible piece of muck at every level. First, shootings that occur in the homeland are the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security, not the Pentagon.
The Pentagon is for fighting foreign bad guys, not U.S. citizens, dummy.
Even the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence branches are supposed to be limited to “Insider Threats” to the Defense Department, not random citizens in civilian settings.
But even if this issue were in Bishop Garrison’s jurisdiction, he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. There’s good reason Bishop Garrison cites no data in his response: it blows him out of the water. Of the 16,425 murders in 2019, just 38 involved “right-wing extremists, including White supremacists.” 38. That is 0.02% of murders. Surely, Bishop Garrison is aware of this 38 number; it comes from the ADL, with whom Bishop Garrison appears to be buddies, and whose similarly shrill turn towards partisan hackery makes them deserving of joint panel appearances.
So “mass shooters” now serves as the pretext for the Pentagon Opinion Police. But without getting too deep into crime statistics, let’s just say the “Mass Shooter” profile does not resemble Bishop Garrison’s “top threat to national security,” if that threat is supposed to be White supremacy.
We have learned that according to the military’s new ideological vetter-in-chief, it is no longer acceptable to criticize the 1619 Project, BLM, or the riots that took place in the wake of George Floyd’s death. In fact, such criticism is now a new form of national security threat.
What we’ve seen so far is shocking enough, but we’ve compiled some more of Bishop Garrison’s greatest hits to allow the full story to sink in.
This is a man tasked with shaping the ideological makeup of the United States Armed forces, and we have a right to a much fuller sense of what and how he really thinks.
“Bishop-209”: The Best Of Bishop Garrison’s Racism and Fake News “Malfunctions”
When Republican swamp monster Max Boot penned “2017 Was The Year I Learned About My White Privilege,” Bishop Garrison tweeted he was glad Max Boot “got here” but that “more men” of Boot’s background (Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations) need “to do the same.” Garrison wanted arch neocon Eliot Cohen to know acknowledging “white privilege” is every white person’s moral obligation, not something “gutsy” to do:
Eliot Cohen, who was simply expressing support for Max Boot’s “white privilege” boot-licking, surely felt blind-sided by Bishop Garrison’s random drive-by in his replies. Seeking not to engage but standing by his statement, Cohen tweeted back: “QED.”
But the new head of the Pentagon Opinion Police called him out: saying “QED” to a “young African-American man” (he was ~35) is itself an act of White Privilege.
In the above exchange, Radicalism RoboCop decided poor Max Boot did have an obligation to confess “white privilege,” but failed to self-flagellate meekly enough. Max Boot should have been flogging himself while sitting alone in a corner, not in a newspaper editorial.
If you still want a career in the military, here’s how to pass Bishop Garrison’s “Extremism” review:
God save the troops who don’t know never to say “QED” to a Black man. Radicalism RoboCop might have an “Ed-209 moment” and malfunction over the difference between Latin initialism and Extremist White Supremacy.
Bishop-209 seems to “malfunction” over every new idiom he encounters. You may recall Governor Ron DeSantis used the phrase “monkey this up” — meaning “screw” things up — one time during his 2018 gubernatorial race against Florida candidate Andrew Gillum. Bishop-209 responded:
Bishop-209’s programming is once again even more aggressive than expected. Not only was the statement racist, anyone who says it’s not racist now becomes racist for defending it. This is the classic Kafkatrap argumentation at the heart of critical race theory.
When Axios said Trump’s tweets in July 2019 were a “nativist attack” because they jokingly suggested Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib return to the countries they immigrated from if they hate things so much in America, Bishop-209 corrected Axios: “Don’t be afraid to say racist.”
Completely race-neutral statements are deemed “overt racism.”
In Sept. 2019, Bishop-209 malfunctions over the mere sight of a white woman cutting a black teen’s hair:
The image Bishop Garrison is melting down about is below:
The above exchange, in which Bishop Garrison finds it “disgusting” “how happy” a white woman is to remove a black teen’s dreads, has all the hallmarks of a classic Bishop Garrison sequence. With no context, no information, and nothing facially wrong or racist about the event in question, Bishop Garrison is absolutely certain it is “racist,” and condemns those who don’t see the racism as being racist themselves (Kafkatrapping).
Snap judgments and belligerent disdain for nuance form the core of Bishop-209’s first instincts. When the Austin serial bombings of March 2018 happened, Bishop Garrison immediately framed the events as White Supremacist Terrorism because some of the package bombs blew up in a predominately Black and Latino neighborhood. When a Twitter user replied that the bombs’ random locations and White victims undercut his racism claim, Bishop-209 snapped back that the “race component” cannot be ignored:
You would think the words “too nuanced” would not be a staple in the vocabulary of someone whose job is to distinguish “opinion” from “extremism” for the U.S. military. Bishop-209 is programmed, however, to believe the definition of terror is too nuanced.
It’s the same reasoning Bishop Garrison uses to deem all Trump supporters racist, misogynist extremists. “There is no room for nuance.” No Trump supporters in the military can claim “but I’m not like that.”
For millions of Southerners, the Confederate flag is not a symbol of racism but of Southern heritage and Southern pride. But “high-minded” and “academic discussions” about “nuance” aren’t Bishop Garrison’s thing.
Bishop-209 has very simply programming. You plug something into CNN or a Democrat’s mouth, and Bishop-209 spits it back unthinkingly.
For example, when mainstream media briefly created a fake narrative that President Trump had a “secret bank account in China,” Bishop-209 was all over it to amplify the fake news.
When the Hunter Biden laptop story came out and Trump mentioned it during the Presidential Debate, Bishop Garrison immediately joined the chorus of NatSec flunkies describing the laptop story as “Russian conspiracy theories”:
In December 2016, Tulsi Gabbard pointed out the U.S. funded ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Bishop Garrison’s response? Join Team Orange Hitler, Tulsi!
It’s like Joe Biden and Bishop Garrison are in Trading Places. Biden tells black people who don’t support Democrats “You ain’t black!” and Bishop Garrison tells Democrats don’t support terrorists “You ain’t Democrat!”
But even the underlying substance to Garrison’s exchange with Tulsi Gabbard is amusing. Tulsi’s point about the U.S. funding ISIS, which the Bush-Obama-Biden political leadership has always chosen to censor rather than engage, is now being pointed out by emboldened Chinese diplomats who are replying to our Secretary of State’s tweets with inconvenient facts.
How would Bishop Garrison handle such a tweet by a Chinese dignitary?
The Bigger Picture
“Extremist” used to mean functionally, but not quite legally, terrorist. “Extremist” speech and opinions are definitionally lawful and protected by the First Amendment. The term’s introduction as a category of Army Counterintelligence concern has historically been justified by “extremism’s” adjacency to terrorism and Insider Threat subversion — not simply as a target for its own sake as opinions that higher-ups find wrong. That has slowly been changing, and now the levee has finally broken.
The utility of critical race theory for Democrats is that it takes racial proxies for political opinion (such as white Christians tending to support Republicans, and African-Americans, single women and LGBT folks tending to support Democrats), and then racially and sexually gerrymanders targeted institutions to make them more politically Democrat. Some helpful infographics tell the tale:
With Democrats having fully become the Party Of War, and Republicans presently divided between Pro-War neocons and Anti-War MAGA supporters, each of the Biden administration, neocon Republicans, and permanent “deep state” elements of the Pentagon share a vested interest in purging the U.S. military of MAGA holdovers.
Bishop Garrison’s chief role is to radically expand the military’s dominion over traditional civilian policy-making — where MAGA politicians still hold a kingmaker’s influence — by using critical race theory to eschew the limiting tenet of “the water’s edge.”
Bishop Garrison is part of the War Machine’s “human rights” grift that tries to justify cluster bombs and regime change operations — plus billions in new military spending and arms procurement contracts — on the basis of accused “human rights violations” happening in other countries. This is why Garrison is triggered by left-wingers like Tulsi Gabbard suggesting the U.S. should not be involved in a war with Syria.
See, after the Cold War ended without NATO firing a single shot in its entire 42-year history (1949-1991), the U.S. could no longer justify our world-dominating military deployments, spending and research — and therefore our military advantage — on the basis of actual threats faced at home or to NATO partners. So instead of just being honest and calling it Empire (as nation-states once did before the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights), we added “human rights abuses” of foreigncitizens as vital to America’s long-term national security. After invoking this principle to carry out the successful bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1995, we never looked back.
But the whole scheme is funny if you take universal principles seriously. It would justify Syria 100-X’ing its military spend and bombing Flint, Michigan because American kids were poisoned there:
But Bishop Garrison’s grift is even more sinister: he is part of the U.S. military’s definitional expansion of “human rights abuses” beyond violent or physical repression of foreign populations (such as real or imagined chemical attacks) and into structural and social repression. Most members of the unsuspecting American public have only caught a passing glimpse of this long-in-the-works MICIMATT plan through flashpoints, like Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley’s defying a civilian Command-in-Chief’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan on the grounds that, without the U.S. War Machine, “Women’s rights will go back to the Stone Age.”
Mark Milley is the highest-ranking military officer in America. Installed by a Republican, everything he touches turns to intersectional dog-crap. This is not an accident.
Just this month, Max Boot’s WaPo editorial peppered in the same intersectional logic for maintaining the War Machine, blasting Biden’s planned Afghanistan withdrawal with “Think of all the girls going to school, all the women in the workforce.” David Ignatius’s WaPo editorial pleaded for war in the name of “women of Afghanistan, who fear new oppression.” Then the full WaPo editorial board denounced the withdrawal plan not primarily on the grounds of security, but of social progress:
After a brief and seemingly halfhearted effort at diplomacy, Mr. Biden has decided on unconditional withdrawal, a step that may spare the United States further costs and lives but will almost certainly be a disaster for the country’s 39 million people — and, in particular, its women. It could lead to the reversal of the political, economic and social progress for which the United States fought for two decades, at a cost of more than 2,000 American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. And, according to the U.S. intelligence community and a study commissioned by Congress, it could allow al-Qaeda to restore its base in Afghanistan, from which it launched the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001…
Perhaps, too, some officials say hopefully, the Taliban will moderate its denial of women’s rights and other repressive policies to preserve international aid, without which Afghanistan’s economy would implode…
At a minimum, it will mean an abandonment of those Afghans who believed in building a democracy that guaranteed basic human rights — and the nullification of the sacrifices of the American servicemen who were killed or wounded in that mission. Mr. Biden has chosen the easy way out of Afghanistan, but the consequences are likely to be ugly. [WaPo]
Meanwhile, the growing number of episodes that reveal intersectionality as pretext for Empire have resulted in parts of the story becoming well-memed:
Bishop Garrison’s role is imperative in this transition.
By institutionally mandating support for intersectional theory and positing all opposition as “extremism,” human rights justifications for Pentagon deployments get driven permanently and irreversibly into the DNA of American military doctrine. Simultaneously, the Pentagon gets completely purged of all personnel and institutional support that represents populist-nationalist-traditionalist ideas or sympathies.
The result? Regime Loyalty is ensured internally, while the military-defense sector and its blob-itudinous sprawl are prevented from being leveraged as a base of support by political opposition more generally. Call it the Pentagon Patriot Purge.
Many Republicans, of the Max Boot-Bill Kristol-Rick Wilson-Evan McMullin strain, will not only go along, but will indeed be its most enthusiastic supporters. The neocon wing of the Republican Party will be all too happy to finally win the GOP civil war with a kill shot from critical race theory activists. The only surprise would be if the GOP establishment (GOPe) didn’t help the DNC come up with the scheme.
Case in point? Consider Max Boot’s “white privilege” op-ed mentioned above, which begins: “I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at ‘political correctness.’ The Trump era opened my eyes. ”
The Pentagon Patriot Purge is a two-fer: the DNC-GOPe War Machine consolidates total support for militarism abroad, while wiping out the political opposition and institutional resistance at home.
This is why Bishop Garrison’s think tank The Rainey Center bills itself as “Post Partisan” despite being comprised exclusively of the most partisan, anti-MAGA hacks in Washington. It is a bipartisan alliance of neoliberal Democrats and War Machine Republicans in coalition to stamp out anti-security state sentiment on both right and left.
So it is no small wonder that Bishop Garrison crawled into his post by slathering through the sludge of Norm Eisen’ faux national security NGOs.
See, e.g., from 45:00-1:02:30 below:
A final note should help clarify how these corrupt forces all fit together:
Recall that before joining Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, and before becoming a sock puppet for companies who make Weapons Of Death in the name of Human Rights, Bishop Garrison got his start in “Peace and Security Operations” at Deloitte.
For readers who don’t know what “Peace and Security” means, it’s not at all what you probably just imagined. It’s a giant scam field boiling over from a witches brew of war profiteers, money-mad energy lobbyists, voracious capital investment firm vultures, banksters from the World Bank and IMF, intelligence creepy-crawlies from every country on earth, and bulging-eyed bought-off politicians trying to hit every buzzword on the democracy bingo card they get handed by their advisers. And those advisers come from exactly the twisted self-licking ice cream cone of corporate boards, NGOs, philanthrophic foundations and astroturfed activist organizations you’d expect.
The racket works like this: These war-torn countries we just LoveBombed For Peace need reconstruction and development money to get their toilets working again; they need modernized infrastructure to attract emerging market capital, they need massive energy projects to become that modern country, and they need to take out an impossible mountain of debt to pay for it all.
To try to illustrate this point quickly, our team just went to a random World Bank page (this one, if you want to follow along) and did a Ctrl + F for “Peace and Security.”
See it? Well you click that “Peace and Security Topic Page” link, it takes you to a page that doesn’t have the word “peace” anymore.
But boy oh boy does it sure have the word “Development.”
Now ask yourself: how many dyed-in-the-wool MAGA supporters are stoked to go along with the World Bank’s “A Marshall Plan with Africa,” “Migration and Climate,” and “Climate Change and Development”?
You can see how MAGA, or proxies for MAGA — including demographic proxies like white Christians, or cultural proxies like gun enjoyers, or memetic proxies like sharers of Pepe memes or QAnon content — would sort of, you know, throw a wrench in this whole system, right?
So all proxies for MAGA must be purged.
During the Cold War, Empire was maintained in the name of fighting communism and fascism. Today, the Globalist American Empire increasingly justifies war on the grounds of fighting traditionalism and defending or promoting some aspect of woke ideology.
Or to put it terms of Bishop Garrison’s Twitter bio, Captain America used to punch Nazis:
Now, Captain America is just punching you, your family, and the nation you once loved.
