General Charles Q. Brown—Too Many Red Flags

by Scott Sturman for American Greatness 

As the highest ranking officer in the United States armed forces, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) is the primary advisor in military matters to the President, Department of Defense, Homeland Security Council, and the National Security Council. Do the skill sets and history of political activism of the current nominee, General Charles Q. Brown, qualify him to lead the country’s military during these turbulent times?

“Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.” – Sun Tzu

The United States military’s reputation and mission readiness are in free fall, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI), which pervade the armed services, bear much of the blame. General Brown supports, promotes, and defends DEI passionately and unapologetically. Plunging enlistments, declining public trust and confidence in the highest echelons of command, lowering physical fitness and aptitude standards, and plummeting military power ratings are the result of these self-inflicted wounds. Just as saltwater tarnishes a sword, DEI erodes the fabric of trust, competence, and unit cohesion.

General Brown represents DEI in euphemistic terms that are palatable to the public and allude to fairness and equal opportunity. But DEI has deep Marxist roots based on critical theories, where merit is minimized, and power structures are based on identity, oppression, and racism. It is a stealth weapon devised by academics that breeds conformity of thought, marginalizes members of organizations solely due to superficial characteristics, and engenders favoritism. The Air Force faces a 2000 pilot deficit, but General Brown’s priority is not focused on this crucial concern but rather the racial and sexual distribution of the pilots he commands.

His unwavering support of identity-based quotas and DEI imperatives is sufficient to justify and rationalize the purge of the depleted pilot corps of competent aviators that is composed of too many white males.

“Treat your men as you would your own beloved sons. And they will follow you into the deepest valley.”  – Sun Tzu

With deep divisions within the military and the uncertainty of its ability to defend the country, General Brown’s leadership style comes into question. An effective leader cannot adhere to an ideology that denigrates many of those under one’s command. Leadership embodies Eisenhower’s humility as it relates to blood and sacrifice, the qualities imbued in Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech, and Chiang Kai-Shek’s testimony to morale and spirit.

General Brown has served as the Air Force Chief of Staff since 2020.  The Heritage Foundation’s “2023 Index of Military Strength” notes that under his tenure the Air Force’s military strength has descended from “marginal” in 2021, to “weak” in 2022, and to the lowest mark of “very weak” in 2023. Brown’s command style prioritizes diversity, but the inexorable diminution of military strength raises grave concerns about the practice. The intentional selection of personnel based on race and ideology, prompted the watchdog group the American Accountability Association to file a complaint about possible violations of the Constitution for illegal hiring practices.

Within a month after the George Floyd incident, General Brown, who was serving as Pacific Air Force Commander, publicly voiced his private opinions. In an emotional presentation, the general departed from the military’s customary practice of remaining silent on political issues. HIs rendition of the events personalized the tragedy but lacked context and served as an indictment of America as intrinsically racist. Despite being a beneficiary of an Air Force career that few achieve, he revealed himself as a person consumed by bitterness and self-righteousness rather than a sage leader striving for solutions and assuring his subordinates that justice would be served. His words evoked concerns about his temperament and penchant for analyzing complex problems through a racial lens.

General Brown has not resisted the temptation to opine boldly in public about controversial political issues. The public’s trust in the military has been trending downward for the past 20 years and is approaching historic lows. High ranking officers have become openly political, eschewed impartiality, quibbled, or openly lied to the public. Why would members of the military, whose members represent generations of men and women whose reputations are based on honesty, trust, and integrity, emulate the ethos of members of Congress, whom only 9% of Americans rate “very high” or “high” in these character traits?

The choice to install General Brown as the next CJCS is overtly political. The public should be skeptical of the general’s contentious leadership style which is anchored in DEI ideology—a Marxist derived philosophy, which he has aggressively instituted throughout the Air Force. During his term as Air Force Chief of the Staff, the Air Force has experienced a precipitous drop in morale, recruitment goals, mission readiness, and personal standards. As CJCS, is he willing and able to convey sensitive information relating to national security to the highest reaches of government without introducing personal bias? There are too many red flags. The new CJCS must heal the military’s gaping wounds and restore its traditional priorities of ability, service, and unity without regard to phenotype.

General Brown is not up to the task.

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- July 18

 

Have You Noticed A Lot More Americans Look Like A Frightful Hot Mess?

It looks like public slovenliness and disarray have become more of a norm than a subculture in the last few years.

posted by Joy Pullman at The Federalist

Pajama- and lingerie-wearing customers used to appear mostly at the lowest-end Walmarts and convenience stores. But this summer, it’s looking like the People of Walmart crowd has dramatically increased.

They’re at Target, at Sam’s Club, in the malls. They’re at Trader Joe’s, hip little trans-friendly burger shops, and the farmer’s market. To anyone hitting the beach this summer, have you noticed there, too, what seems like a dramatic increase in whole naked butt cheeks and antisocial narcissists blaring their music?

For Gen Z and others who didn’t catch the site years ago, the blog People of Walmart posts humorous pictures of people whose life choices clearly began going south many years before they ended up making a spectacle of themselves in public. The joke was that people would actually go out not just nearly naked — they do that everywhere now — but in the most unappealing states of near-nakedness, as well as otherwise visibly portraying inner disarray.

The People of Walmart vibe means shockingly overweight, slippers and pajamas 24/7, months of uncombed hair, congealing tattoos, clothes that can only be described as dumpster-fire skank or “nothing smaller than a bedsheet will cover me,” a muddy rainbow of hair shades, or combinations of the above plus other sartorial horrors.

Here are some examples from the blog. Trigger warning.

Of course, highly unattractive near-nakedness is the tip of a growing anti-beauty iceberg. Again, trigger warning: These yucky images may make you laugh too hard to continue reading this article.

Outside highly groomed corporate media, trans cosplay is ugly as sin. (Screengrab from People of Walmart)

One understands people down on their luck deserve some pity and discretion. Also, having been pregnant six times, I can certainly understand the rare need to visit Walmart or the drug store in a sickly state of mind and body.

But a state of constant hot messiness seems to be expanding well beyond the Walmarts that serve the Third World “refugees” federal and state governments have resettled into our communities against Americans’ consent. In my town, at least, it looks like public slovenliness and disarray have become more of a norm than a subculture.

Today, the average person is far fatter (and I’m not talking pleasantly plump). There are many more visible disfigurements such as piercings and tattoos. More people are dressing androgynously and even overtly cross-dressing, which is just plain ugly. To put it succinctly, suddenly lots of people don’t look very good. At all.

This is notable because there is indeed a correlation between one’s outward appearance and our inner state. I’m not talking about the things people can’t control, like being born with Grandpa’s large nose or a broader body frame than most women.

I’m talking about the things people can control, like wearing clothing that fits, not being dangerously overweight, washing regularly, deciding to stop eating corn syrup, and refusing to deface one’s body. All people have better and worse versions of themselves, and lately it seems a shockingly large number of people are descending into the latter. 

Antisocial Policies

What could have happened in the last three years to produce such strikingly visible expressions of inner chaos and duress? It’s like there was a mass repression of human rights that stole people’s habits, routines, reasons to get up and get dressed in the morning, and connections to their communities.

As with many other issues, it seems that here lockdowns accelerated a preexisting trend. Even before lockdowns, obesity rates were at an all-time high. Nearly half of Americans were taking at least one prescription drug, and a quarter were taking three or more. Unprecedented numbers of people were being diagnosed with autism, autoimmune disorders, and allergies.

Family chaos as measured by broken or never-formed marriages was at historical highs. So was the number of American adults taking medication for mental illnesses. In fact, in 2020, nearly one-quarter of all Americans — including some babies — were taking psychiatric medications. In the late-aughts, the latest data available, American women were trending dramatically less happy than in the 1970s.

Of course, many factors go into making much higher proportions of Americans a hot, sad mess. But it’s obvious lockdowns accelerated, and likely amplified, terrible preexisting trends. It will take years to quantify the damage, but just go outside and look around. It’s visible in Americans’ bodies, in their clothing, in their behavior, and in their faces.

Deliberate Ugliness

What’s also different about this saturated ugliness is not only the lack of even a little embarrassment that might motivate change, but also the aggressive cultural messaging promoting it. Rather than being alarmed into productive action by so many Americans’ evident disarray, despair, and dishevelment, our culture controllers instead legitimize inner and outer chaos.

We’ve seen the pro-obesity campaigns. I can’t find new clothing now without being embarrassed for the models showing the options to me. Again, nobody minds realistically dappled skin or non-Barbie-shaped thighs. In fact, I support that and find such images encouraging.

But advertising and movies are now going far beyond showing realistic imperfections or the diversity of beauty to pushing truly repulsive images. We’re not being encouraged to find beauty in reality, but to believe that what’s ugly is in fact beautiful.

They’re Doing It on Purpose

This is not an accident, it’s cultural warfare. As Chris Rufo explained earlier this year, leftist academics have created an entire thoughtworld celebrating grotesqueness for ideological ends. They openly aim “to displace the old society with what might be called a ‘queer-normative society,’ a ‘fat-normative society,’ a ‘mental-illness-normative society.'” The ultimate goal is an “anti-normative society.” 

The goal is to achieve an inversion and the hegemony of a non-normative ideal, which you see valorized in the academic literature on all these different axes — gender, sexuality, body type, or psychological health.

…We might categorize this new ideal as a “gender-neutral, non-binary, obese, mentally disturbed, ‘they/them’ pronoun user, operating as a radically autonomous individual that is totally disconnected from any of the traditional bonds, relationships, and constraints.”

I’m not saying the People of Walmart are activists aiming to bring about a non-normative society. While they certainly bear responsibility for their life choices just like the rest of us, they’ve also been victimized by our cultural leaders, who share significant blame for the obvious decay of our society.

Elites are leaders. They point their culture in certain directions. A pro-norms elite would celebrate beauty, health, and virtues that tend to result in a beautiful and healthy culture, such as self-discipline, sacrifice, restraint, patience, and courage.

Our elite instead celebrate self-indulgence, laziness, and degeneracy. They obliterate aspirational ideals and attack mental health-protecting, commitment-based associations such as marriage, the natural family, and church. They even attack reality itself, such as the existence of men and women, standards of beauty, life choices that promote health, and the obviously horrific outcomes of free-for-all sex.

So it’s no wonder that people subjected to decades of systematic dehumanization and de-naturalization would reflect their social architecture. Destroying norms damages people, and it damages the most vulnerable people the most. That’s why you can find so many of these sad and confused folks at Walmart.

Increasingly, though, it’s not just Walmart. It’s everywhere. The “let them eat cake” ruling class doing this to America doesn’t deserve to be in charge of anything, ever.

Nationalist Big Tent or 90s Redux?

by Christopher Roach for American Greatness 

Everyone figured that the Republican primary fight would feature Florida Governor Ron DeSantis taking on frontrunner Donald Trump, but DeSantis appears to be sinking fast. His lack of charm is pretty evident in personal interactions with voters, and his campaign messaging is odd and inconsistent.

He has lately tried to regain some lost ground through aggressive attacks on Trump from the right, but this messaging falls flat. That said, his floundering campaign provides some broader lessons for those on the right.

A Successful Agenda Focused on Freedom and Family

DeSantis secured his original gubernatorial victory by aligning closely with Trump. Once governor, he has made a well-justified name for himself by acting with precision, effectiveness, and moral courage.

During Covid, he opposed aggressive mandates and extended lockdowns, as well as mandatory masking.  Championing individual autonomy, he argued that government should be sharing information, not shutting down schools, declaring who can run a business, or how individuals should take personal risks.

On the issue of transgenderism and wokeness, he has generally staked out equally solid terrain. Namely, he has not attacked the right of adults to be gay or trans or whatever, but he has stood up for the right of parents to keep these sexual ideologies from being foisted on their kids without their knowledge or consent. And he has also stood against permitting life-changing and irreversible sex-change surgeries for children. 

His well-publicized fight with Disney arose from its opposition to a law that prohibited teachers from proselytizing about homosexuality and other sexual practices to young students. Mislabeled “don’t say gay,” its restrictions are perfectly reasonable to everyone but child molesters and the far left.

These laws proved necessary because the gay rights movement turned away from its older campaign focused on the right to be left alone (and more controversially, to marry) into a new fight for a permanent social revolution, propagandizing children into getting sex-change operations, and imposing “acceptance” upon those who disagree under penalty of law. As this movement has become more aggressive and invasive of individual autonomy, there has been an understandable backlash and decline in public support.

Standing alone, this record would provide a good foundation for a campaign, as it shows vision, courage, and capability. But his latest attempts to leverage his record to paint Trump as a liberal—including this strange advertisement—have a hint of the sexual puritanism that fueled the 1990s culture wars.

This will prove to be a dead end, which will face an even less receptive audience than it did the first time around.

Nationalism vs. Re-Fighting the Sexual Revolution

Back in the 1990s, conservative activists’ focus was not on issues of national identity, but on cutting taxes, supporting the military-industrial complex, and re-fighting the already-lost battles of the 1960s sexual revolution.

Together, it was not a particularly successful campaign—remember Clinton won twice—and redeploying such an approach today seems especially out-of-touch with the national mood. If by some miracle DeSantis won the nomination, his recent stances seem guaranteed to make things more difficult for him in a general election.

For a long time, Republican election strategists counseled that the party needed to get with the times and embrace social liberalism and fiscal conservatism. This also never worked, either in primaries or general elections. Dole, McCain, Romney, and other moderate types all went down in flames.

Rather than subtracting half of the Republican coalition, as the consultants advised, Trump simply changed the conversation. America First was a nationalist platform, which rested on the three legs of foreign policy restraint, immigration restriction, and nationalist economic policies, such as tariffs. This differed from both parties, each of which advanced a flavor of cosmopolitan globalism.

Unlike legacy Republicans, he no longer aimed to reduce social security or other popular programs under the rubric of fiscal conservatism. By emphasizing issues of national identity, Trump deemphasized the campaign for moral purity, which was popular with evangelicals, but few others. Thus, the nationalist approach was a mirror image of the old advice: it embraced a kind of social conservatism, coupled with economic populism.

This graph of 2016 voters shows that the socially conservative and economically moderate group (the upper left quadrant) was the most in play, while the socially liberal and fiscal conservatives of Republican strategists’ dreams represent only a tiny cohort (the lower right quadrant).

In light of these realities, DeSantis’ best strategy, both in the primary and in general, is to pursue Trumpism without Trump. After all, Trump’s nationalist policies are popular, there is a constituency for them, and they expanded the Republican coalition.

Trump’s personal style, by contrast, is polarizing. It probably attracts as many voters as it repels. And his appointments of incompetents and disloyal snakes, along with his general inability to translate good ideas into results, remain legitimate concerns even among those who support him.

While Trump has (understandably) taken it as a major personal affront that his former protégé DeSantis would run against him, he and his surrogates have made this worse with their extreme hostility to Trump, who remains popular.

DeSantis could have said, sympathetically, that Trump attracts the wrong kinds of attention and encourages extreme resistance by his opponents. Exhibit A would be the FBI’s and Deep State’s long-running vendetta against him and the various machinations to “fortify” the 2020 election.

DeSantis could have said none of it was fair, that he voted for Trump two times, but, alas, we have to live in the real world, and the country is more important than any one man. Instead, he seems to be trying to forget what happened to Trump in 2020 and instead focus on resurrecting the purity-based social conservatism of the 1990s, for which there is little appetite among voters.

We do not have to like all of these social changes. But, in the words of Russell Kirk, politics is the “art of the possible.” Living in a revolutionary age, the terrain is always changing. At any given moment, the Left must be opposed where it is presently advancing, even if that means tactically ceding territory that they conquered 10 or 20 years ago.

We don’t have to affirm or celebrate these changes, but we can acknowledge that many of these issues are no longer viable political debates any more than bimetallism.

Does Any of This Matter if Elections Are Rigged?

Setting aside the question of forging a majority coalition, there is another dilemma. Trump did not prevail in 2020, in part, because the election was rigged. His opponents admit it. Neither Trump nor DeSantis have a good answer for this problem. 

For Trump, the injustice of 2020 is a central part of his schtick. He argues that he and the voters were robbed of a win in 2020, and that he deserves it this time as a matter of justice. Unfortunately, he does not have a coherent strategy to deal with the election machinations that brought about the 2020 result, other than to say, “We need to win even bigger this time.” This sounds like wishful thinking, at best.

DeSantis has said he will be ballot harvesting en masse if he somehow wins the nomination. While this is a start, why isn’t there a strategy to get absentee, mail-in, and other nontraditional forms of voting banned in every single jurisdiction Republicans have influence?If Democrats stole one election, they can steal another. A good messaging strategy that would get more votes and win under ordinary circumstances will not prevail in an unfair process, even against the decrepit and unpopular Joe Biden.

If any electoral success is possible, the winner must walk and chew gum at the same time. First, he must build a majority coalition that appeals both to legacy Republicans and to independent voters, who tend to be socially conservative and economically populist. Second, the winner must find some way to outsmart election-rigging, which proved decisive in 2020 and has not disappeared during the interim.

Unfortunately, neither Trump nor DeSantis appears presently to have a good plan to do that.

Dems Panicking as Biden Campaign Numbers Tell a Bleak Tale

Nick Arama reporting or RedState 

Numbers on the various 2024 campaigns have just come in, and they’re telling a bleak tale for Joe Biden.

According to the campaign financial disclosures filed, Biden had $20 million while former President Donald Trump took in $22 million.

What does this look like for comparison’s sake?

It’s historically low. Biden is doing worse in terms of a war chest than most other recent candidates at the same point. Former President Obama had $37 million in 2011, while Trump had over $56 million in June 2019.

Now, it is important to note that the number doesn’t include PAC money. With Democratic Party account numbers, Biden had $77 million in the bank. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign and political action committee raised over $35 million during the second quarter of 2023.

Most of Biden’s money is coming from wealthy donors. It’s still early, but the small donors haven’t shown up yet, and Democrats are worried.

In particular, some Democrats expressed anxiety about what they viewed as Biden’s mediocre small-dollar donor operation — a sign, they argued, that there is a lack of excitement for the president. Across the campaign and a joint-fundraising committee, Biden brought in more than $10 million from donors giving less than $200. But it was still less than half of what Obama raked in from small donors during the same period in 2011. Both were running with largely token primary opposition.

That’s despite having an email list that his campaign has said includes “close to 25 million email subscribers.”

While some big donors haven’t weighed in yet and small donors are a question, one of the wealthy donors whose contribution is raising some eyebrows is LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman who donated $699,600.00 on April 26 to the Biden Victory Fund. We’ve written about Hoffman before — he’s the guy who funded E. Jean Carroll in her suit against former President Donald Trump. He’s also the guy who took at least one trip to Epstein Island. He visited the White House five times last year, and he helped throw a fundraiser that Biden attended in California last month.

But beyond the money numbers, the other numbers that the Democrats are concerned about are his campaign numbers. People have termed his campaign “frugal.” Anyone who has seen Biden govern knows he’s not frugal. Democrats are questioning how little time and effort he seems to be putting into the campaign effort.

Biden’s campaign spent a total of $1.1 million in the second quarter of this year, a remarkably small amount that would put him behind several Democratic Senate candidates in terms of expenditures.

Biden had four people on his payroll during that time: Campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez, principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks, spokesperson Kevin Munoz, and general counsel Maury Riggan. His campaign spent less than $1,500 on travel, accommodations and airfare. On rent, he spent nothing. He has not opened a campaign headquarters yet and much of his staff has been working out of the Democratic National Committee’s building.

One might think from that that he wasn’t even campaigning. Talk about a “slow pace” for the 80-year-old. He hid in the basement for the 2020 campaign, with COVID as an excuse, but he’s not going to be able to do that now, particularly not given the bad record that he has. So that’s raising questions, as a CNN report noted, from some about whether he will truly be running (even though Biden has already declared) or if there’s a replacement in the wings.

The conversations keep happening – quiet whispers on the sidelines of events, texts, emails, furtive phone calls – as top Democrats and donors reach out to those seen as possible replacement presidential candidates.

Get ready, they urge, in conversations that aides to several of the people involved have described to CNN: Despite what he has said, despite the campaign that has been announced, President Joe Biden won’t actually be running for reelection.

They feel like time is already running out and that the lack of the more robust campaign activity they want to see is a sign that his heart isn’t really in it.

It’s hard not to see Gavin Newsom posturing like a candidate in the wings.

Reporter Simon Ateba summed it up.

DeSantis Next Move – Here Comes the Big Hug

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

What comes next in the management of Ron DeSantis is predictable.  I know these guys.  This is what I call the Alex Castellanos shift.

After failure to launch on the original strategy, team DeSantis organized a crisis intervention last Sunday.  What comes next is entirely predictable.  The people managing Ron DeSantis will now shift to the Alex Castellanos approach.  Christine Pushaw and her bitter hate approach will be distanced, and she’s told to get quiet.  The tone of the influencers will be told to soften immediately and follow the candidate.

Here comes the BIG HUG!

The managers will likely use the pre-planned CNN interview with Jake Tapper as the launch vehicle to shift Ron DeSantis into the mode where he praises Donald Trump (the hug).  You might even hear phrases like “without him, I wouldn’t be governor,” and “look, what they did to President Trump is unfair and unwarranted.”

The shift will be strategic and intended to portray a softer, more deliberate and professionally demure Ron DeSantis sympathetically. Neutering the confliction between himself and the campaign target, Donald Trump.  DeSantis will be trained to speak warmly, perhaps even effusively about President Trump, while reinforcing his agreement and opposition to the unfair DC attacks against the former President and frontrunner.

DeSantis will affirm the wrongful nature of the current DOJ targeting.  Then, after affirming the wrongful nature of the Deep State effort to attack Trump, DeSantis will then tack to a position of saying ‘but here’s the deal.’  ‘While Trump was unfairly attacked by all of the DC mechanisms that are corrupt and wrong, and there were dozens of examples of that hatred we could rightly discuss, I’m the guy who can hold them accountable and target the enemies who attacked him.’

In this approach Ron DeSantis positions himself as the professional, strategic ‘white knight‘, who will combat the deep state machinery and deliver retribution because he is not emotionally attached to it.  He’s the deep strategist who will defeat the Deep State with smarter maneuvers, less words, a sharper approach and better qualified people.

Factually, if he ever wanted a chance, this is how the DeSantis campaign should have started. However, their authentic campaign approach – the approach they believe in – didn’t work.  Now the Brutus approach as outlined by Alex Castellanos comes out, “snuggle up real close and wait to shiv him in the ribs.”

Watch, you’ll see it.

An approach that gently shifts away from antagonism and combat into an approach that contains praise, even effusive praise, as a strategic move.

It won’t be subtle, it will be obvious to those looking for it, but it will be different.  The problem they have is the same problem with the original launch, the shift is fake, inauthentic and transparently purposeful.

Watch and you will see the Big Hug play roll out….

…. But keep in mind, it’s all an act!