One of the first acts by Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense, retired General Lloyd Austin, was to announce an “extremist” stand down. The idea was that the military was simply infested with white supremacists and white nationalists and white whitey-ists, and it needed to get its mind right. There was an initial burst of enthusiasm. Tattoos and unit symbols were scrutinized for hidden meaning. The Special Forces medical program, home of the “Goat Lab”

was shocked to learn that the Roman numeral three, that is “III,” that they used as the logo of the “Trauma Three” course, was also associated with the Three Percenters, a pseudo-militia group that has nothing to do with white supremacy or white anything. Nevertheless, the offending logo was sent off to a reeducation camp out in Montana or somewhere.

When the big day arrived, the military hierarchy was somewhat stunned to discover that the rank-and-file were not gender studies undergrads. They didn’t lap up the Critical Race Theory bullsh** being slung at them. This pullquote is from my colleague, Nick Arama’s, post The Troubling Effort to Indoctrinate Our Service Members on Extremism, BLM and Antifa.

“We cannot confuse a First Amendment grievance because of social injustice organization and some of the criminals that latched on to go ahead and loot, destroy and commit other crimes. There’s two clear, distinct groups right there,” Colón-López said, referring to the difference between peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters and looters who disrupted some of those events.

The looting has been used by some television commentators to convince viewers that the protests were equivalent to the Capitol attacks and that message has left a mark on some of the younger forces, Colón-López said. [….]

Sometimes the younger troops take what they see on TV as, “OK so that’s what this means,” Colón-López said. “We have to educate them, no, that’s not what that meant.”

Imagine that. Those illiterate yobs couldn’t tell the difference between mobs rampaging in the streets of dozens of American cities (in the case of Portland and Seattle–I use the term American as a geographical rather than cultural reference–that resulted in hundreds of injures, about two-dozen deaths, and billions of dollars in economic losses and a relatively modest number of people who used a large political rally as cover for their rampage through the Capitol.

Apparently, the program envisaged by the US military to suppress possible wrongthink is much more extensive than a periodic class. In fact, it has much more in common with a communist political commissar system than it does with anything associated with military formations in the Western world. This is from a Newsweek op-ed titled From Soft Liberalism to Iron-Fisted Leftism in Today’s U.S. Military. The author is a Marine Corps reservist who is also a Texas deputy attorney general.

We were instructed that there is a Taliban-like threat in the United States called “domestic terrorism.” These terrorists are characterized in part by “anti-government,” “anti-authority” or “abortion-related” extremism and various “supremacist” ideas. None of these terms are defined. The Marine Corps entrusts the government’s HR department to figure that out.

Reporting requirements are key. Do you suspect someone supports an “extremist ideology?” Alert the chain of command. Have you heard a Marine express “contempt toward officials?” Notify the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Don’t handle anything on your own. Just rat them out. After all, “service is a privilege” and it’d be a shame to lose that privilege for failing to do your part to stamp out “extremists.” One PowerPoint slide posed this imperative in stark terms: “Do you want to be a Marine or do you want to be part of an organization that sows disunity and hate. You cannot have divided loyalties.”

…

January 6 provided the pretext that the government, media and Democratic Party needed to drum up paranoia about white-nationalist domestic terrorism. A month later, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memo to all Pentagon leadership laying the groundwork for my unit’s Sunday morning indoctrination.

In his memo, Austin announced that the Department of Defense “will not tolerate…actions associated with extremist or dissident ideologies” and ordered all 1.4 million personnel to receive “extremism” training. And he promised it was just the beginning: the “stand-down is just the first initiative of what I believe must be a concerted effort to…eliminate the corrosive effects that extremist ideology and conduct have on the workforce.”

Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Harker followed with his own memo. He announced the objective for the entire Navy Department: nothing short of “eradicating extremism.” How? By rooting out “actions that betray our oaths” like promoting “ideology” or “doctrine” that challenges the “gender identity and sexual orientation” agenda or advancing efforts that allegedly “deprive individuals of their civil rights.”

In other words, advocating for the Biblical view of sex and marriage in law and policy is, according to today’s armed forces, tantamount to oath betrayal.

Then came the Marine Corps’ turn to mouth the right things about “extremism.” In late February, the highest-ranking enlisted Marine issued a memo to all hands condemning our institutional failure to “completely eliminate,” “eradicate,” and “conquer” all “racists, bigots, homophobes and bullies.” Those people “are not welcome” in the military. “It is impossible,” the memo says, “to be both a good Marine and be any one of those things at the same time.” Again, specifics of “those things” are undefined. The author of the memo and the four-star Commandant leave that to the military’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force.

Finally, on March 5, the Marine Corps released an official directive: no later than April 2, all “commanders and supervisors at all levels will conduct and document a leadership stand-down in order to address issues of extremism in the ranks.” The commandant included a video with the directive, saying, “We must continuously strive to eliminate any division in our ranks.”

If a foreign power had set out to destroy the US military’s combat readiness, they would have gone about this in exactly the same way as the Biden bunch are proceeding. They are labeling political and cultural values that are held by a majority of Americans as extremism. They are encouraging anonymous denunciations of members of the Armed Forces by colleagues for opposing abortion, among other things. If you think this will not be used for score-settling on a heroic scale, you are sadly mistaken. We are already seeing allegations of sexual harassment being used to make the chain of command back off and give marginal troops what amounts to immunity from discipline.

The US military is now firmly in the thrall of the highly-woke left. Every sort of social pathology is being nurtured and protected. Competence in the profession of arms and commitment to the military ethos of “duty, honor, country” has been mostly eradicated in the service of making sure that the right person, right meaning the correct genitalia and/or sexual perversion, is promoted. As the author of the Newsweek piece notes, the military has flown straight past the college campuses to a political commissar system enforced by informers.

We have seen, time and again, what happens when the military turns its focus from warfighting to something else. We saw it at Bataan, at Kasserine Pass, with Task Force Smith at Osan. We saw, in spades, the effects of moral flaccidity and the destruction of military values in Vietnam. China is telling us to our face that an eventual war with us is baked into their geopolitical planning. When that happens, the corrupt and timorous units that we send forth will be slaughtered, and the people to blame are in power right now.