Over the last several years, we have seen a scorched earth campaign against law enforcement play out—the degrading and insulting of individual police officers, and coordinated efforts to defund departments.
From the subversion of the law through financial contributions to irresponsible district attorneys, the Left has executed a strategy to the detriment of our Republic that was likely a major contributor to the recent nationwide rise in crime.
This strategy is ‘Defame, Demoralize, Defund.’
The Left uses this strategy to attack institutions they cannot readily control and are inherently resistant to their ideology. Emboldened by their perceived success against our Police, the Left now seeks to replay this attack in a new campaign against our Military.
This time around, the campaign does not only include replacing dissenting higher ranking officers with regime sycophants, as the Obama purges did. It goes past the 2011 Executive Order 13583, directing ‘government-wide diversity and inclusion training,’ which heralded the introduction of ‘critical race theory’ political indoctrination.
This time, it attacks the reputation and morale of the enlisted men and women by accusing them of being more likely than the average American to be an ‘extremist’ and thus be a danger to the Republic they defend. It should be no surprise that when we look into the Left’s agenda, we see dormant plans to ‘Defund the Military’ coming back to life.
Pursuing the reduction of the Pentagon budget is nothing new for the Left. As this op-ed titled ‘Defund the Police, Then Defund the Military’ by Noah Berlatsky in Foreign Policy puts it, “as with ‘defund the police’ this is not just a slogan—it’s a political philosophy and a political argument.” The author points out this is a ‘mainstream’ Democrat goal that has gone dormant and provides several examples from history.
What the Left learned from their campaign against our Police, which did attain some unfortunate measure of success, is that to decrease funding of an institution and force unpopular policy decisions on the American people, they must first defame the reputation of the rank and file and subsequently demoralize them.
In previous times, they might focus on defaming the institutional leadership or contractors and avoid attacking the character of the rank and file. Now, they start by attacking those who actually do the job. To focus on criticizing the leadership would be to present the impression that the institution is useful in its present form. Can you remember any criticism directed towards the Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo?
No, you probably cannot, even though his police force was involved in the most negative police incident in recent memory. Until this day, he is, in fact, still on the job. Perhaps he has proven a valuable ally to manage the institutional decline the Left so desires?
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Staying true to Rahm Emanuel’s advice, ‘never let a crisis go to waste,’ the attack starts with manipulating a high profile negative incident where some members of the institution are involved, like 1/6. The negative incident is then used to defame the rank and file of the institution. This leads to institutional demoralization through constant shaming, causing self-doubt in the individual service member and deterring recruiting.
When a 19-year-old Army Specialist logs into Facebook to check his identity-tuned ‘news feed’ and sees the headline ‘Have You Witnessed Far-Right Extremism Inside the Military?’ from the New York Times, which presents a form soliciting for reports of ‘extremism’ and states that ‘the radicalization of a sizable fraction of veterans, and the embrace by veterans of conspiracy theories, is hardly news’ – it is going to have a demoralization effect. Widespread ‘extremism’ in the Military is presented as a fact rather than a hypothesis with little evidence.
‘Defund’ then becomes a gentler hill to climb in the House. What better way to prepare the legislative battlefield for the 10% defunding of our Military, as Bernie Sanders and other Democrats advocated, than convincing the American people of the harm the Military perpetuates on our Republic itself. The Left has iterated through several different lines of attack since 1/6 on how best to use the fact that some Veterans were inside the Capital that day to their advantage.
One of the first examples of this line of attack was a conjecture from Democrat Congressman Steve Cohen stating that the Biden regime faced insider threats from the National Guard because it contains a ‘large class of folks who might want to do something.’ This represented an identity-based attack – the individual soldier is dangerous by nature of their identity.
While this attack was damaging, especially coming from a sitting member of Congress, it only implicated a specific group inside our Military and fell short of defaming the whole institution. This identity-based attack has evolved, leading to allegations of a ‘military-to-extremist pipeline’ that seeks to defame everyone in our Military and all Veterans broadly.
An example of this institutional attack can be found in the New Republic in the article ‘How the Military Turns Troops Into Extremists’ by Jasper Craven. Our Military is presented as the source of the domestic extremism, somehow responsible for the events at the Capital on 1/6. The article states, ‘the military created the conditions that led to its staggering power’ and that Veterans are ‘teaching hand signals, battle formations, and other boot camp skills to similarly aggrieved Americans as part of a bloody revenge plot.’
Our Pentagon has noted that extremist groups have targeted our Military for recruitment. However much this does occur, anecdotal examples of recruitment do not support claims of a ‘military-to-extremist pipeline.’ The majority of organizations, both public and private, have ‘military recruitment’ programs.
Every organization wants the skills and confidence that Veterans have gained through their service. For example, the Department of Justice, Humana, Tesla, Microsoft, Home Depot, and the USPS, to name a few. Are all of these notable groups aggressively recruiting from the Military because they desire ‘extremists’ to staff their workforce?
If multiple lawyers are arrested at violent protests throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars where Antifa was present, can we credibly claim a ‘law-firm-to-extremist pipeline’ in operation?
This is not about having a legitimate discussion concerning reducing funding in specific Pentagon programs, which could be a valid debate. It is not about criticizing the leadership of the Pentagon or even specific service members accused of wrongdoing. This is about demoralizing an institution they feel they do not totally control. Is the Left’s real problem with our Military that it lacks a political indoctrination program, like what we see in our universities? For the Left to falsely portray our Military as an ‘extremist’ training camp full of ‘insider threats’ is not only ridiculous, it is an ‘extremist’ act in itself.
