[Editors’ note: To sign the Freedom Center’s petitions to remove Admiral Michael Gilday and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin from their positions, CLICK HERE and HERE.]
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
As the Black Lives Matter riots torched the country, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the violent assaults threatening the nation’s capital were merely protests, and berated Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller who warned, “These cities are burning”.
After the White House came under attack and a BLM mob set fire to the gatehouse, Trump aides, at the request of the president, drafted a document invoking the Insurrection Act that would have ended the nationwide reign of Democrat terror by putting troops on the street.
Milley vocally rejected the idea, claiming that the violent riots were just a protest, and it wasn’t appropriate for the military to be involved in political issues. Of course Eisenhower had sent the troops into Little Rock to integrate the schools, Kennedy had sent them to Mississippi to do the same, and George H.W. Bush had sent them to Los Angeles to put down the Rodney King riots.
After accompanying President Trump to Lafayette Square, where Black Lives Matter rioters had tried to set the ‘Church of the Presidents’ on fire, Milley quickly withered under media pressure.
“I should not have been there,” Milley recited in an apology video and defended the BLM-Antifa insurrections as responses to the “centuries of injustice toward African Americans.”
After scores of cities had been torched, statues pulled down, and hundreds of police officers wounded at the hands of racist Marxist hate groups, Milley argued that, “we should all be proud that the vast majority of protests have been peaceful.”
American POWs in Vietnam had held out under torture rather than record Marxist confession videos like the one that Milley made for the media to protect his career.
But Milley didn’t just stand down in the face of the BLM race riots, he joined the move to divide and weaken the military by bringing the Black Lives Matter curriculum of anti-white and anti-American hate into its ranks. Dividing American soldiers by race has a crippling effect on unit cohesion and general morale, it weakens our national security in the face of the threats from Communist China and our other aggressive enemies, Russia and Iran..
As the summer riots engulfed over 200 American cities, Milley joined the push for diversity and inclusion. He demanded that Fort Bragg and Fort Hood, named after Confederate generals, have their names changed. Milley had never brought this up when he was the commander of Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg and a Fort Hood commanding general, but it wasn’t politically expedient then. And Milley’s career ranks first while his country comes last.
By the fall, Milley was talking about fighting “unconscious” bias in the military – the phantom enemy invented by Critical Race Theorists and the anti-American left to attack white people generally and the American heritage in particular.
Milley’s routine paid off and while there had been talk among Biden’s people about removing him, he stayed on instead, and is now telling Biden and the Democrats what they want to hear.
At a House Armed Services Committee hearing, Rep. Houlahan, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, called on Milley to defend the imposition of critical race theory on the military
Milley was all too ready and launched into a prepared speech in which he lied that critical race theory was studying “laws in the United States, antebellum laws prior to the Civil War that led to a power differential with African-Americans that were three quarters of a human being when this country was formed.”
This was mind-boggling ignorance on the part of a U.S. general, whom the New York Times had previously praised as an “an avid student of history”, and whom the Associated Press had promoted as a “Princeton-educated history buff”, since the three-fifths compromise had nothing to do with race and everything to do with curtailing the power of the slavocracy.
But in the current corrupt media atmosphere, racist ignorance coming from the left is treated as academic wisdom, and here Milley demonstrated that his knowledge of the most basic elements of American history consisted of ignorant smears from the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
Milley, the “avid student of history”, was as much a hoax as the rest of his manufactured image.
The great “history buff” either didn’t know anything about American history, or he was willing to smear America and defame her past in order to score points with his new leftist bosses.
Once again Milley was undermining America’s security to appease his left-wing overseers.
“I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” Milley rambled in his pathetic defense of critical race theory.
American officers studied Marx and Lenin to defeat Communism, not to adopt it. But Milley is overseeing a military that is adopting Marxism on his orders through critical race theory.
Is Milley committed to defeating critical race theory or to embracing it? His comments at the hearing left no doubt as to which side he had chosen in the battle against America.
Milley declared, “I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it”.
The only people who talk that way are academics and white-hating Black Lives Matter Marxists.
President Trump picked Milley because he appeared to be a salt-of-the-earth military man who seemed to share his view of the world. In fact, he was a time-serving opportunist, more committed to advancing his career than defending his country.
Quite a few people have been fooled by Milley who looks like a Hollywood director’s idea of a general, but is actually, a rarity, the second Army boss to have come through the Ivy League.
Milley started out at Belmont Hill School, a posh private school with elite alumni, which these days promotes Black Lives Matter and the low-grade racism of Ibram X. Kendi. He went on to be a Princeton political science ‘longhair’, and picked up a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia. Milley’s militant defense of woke racism in the form of critical race theory was unsurprising because despite his appearance he has the perfect background for it.
The future general had intended to join the military for only four years to “to give meaning to Princeton in the nation’s service”. And Princeton’s left-wing ideology still comes out ahead of the military oath to defend the Constitution and the country it created.
Obama, determined to politicize the military and the intelligence services, picked the Ivy League officer over the heads of more qualified and patriotic senior officers.
As an article noted at the time, “Milley’s rise to top Army officer came quickly. He is commander of U.S. Forces Command, a post he’s held only since last August. Previously, for a little more than one year he was the deputy commander of the Afghanistan war.”
Revealingly, Ash Carter, Obama’s Secretary of Defense, touted Milley as a “statesman” with “the intellect and vision to lead change throughout the Army”. That’s what he’s still doing.
Milley wasn’t there to win wars, but to be a “statesman” and to transform the Army.
Army Ivy League officers love to talk about change for its own sake and Milley rose through the ranks by borrowing Silicon Valley’s rhetoric of disrupting everything. Especially the military.
Ground war is “on the cusp of fundamental change”, he declared in 2016. Wars of the future were coming. “We must be open minded to that change. We may not have divisions or corps, tanks or Bradleys. We don’t know.” Five years later, the Taliban are overrunning Afghanistan using the same raiding tactics that local fighters had been employing for thousands of years.
Meanwhile, Milley’s big achievement is the Army Futures Command in Austin whose people look and sound like the local dot com startup culture in the lefty hipster city.
The defeat in Afghanistan and the ‘wokening’ of the military have a common origin in Ivy League officers like Milley whose enthusiasm for “fundamental change” blinded them to the complete failure of Obama’s appeasement policies and the infiltration of the armed forces by the anti-American Left.
America and its soldiers have been failed and betrayed on the battlefield by academic officers whose sympathies were with the leftist insurgents taking over the country at home, and who saw the war in Afghanistan as a laboratory for demonstrating Obama’s exciting new ideas.
Milley is not the worst of them. He’s the successor to even more craven generals like Stanley McChrystal, but he occupies his position at a crucial time when the survival of the United States military is at stake. And the enemy isn’t in Afghanistan: it’s inside America.
Milley has not only failed to fight this enemy, he has surrendered and joined their Marxist cause.
After losing Afghanistan, Milley is overseeing the defeat of America.
“The conditions are set for winning this war,” Milley had asserted back when he was heading up NATO’s ISAF Joint Command under Obama.
“I don’t think anyone has died in vain, per se,” he recently replied when he was asked if American soldiers in Afghanistan had died in vain.
The mothers of all the men who had died in Afghanistan were no doubt reassured, per se.
Milley has spent his career telling politicians what they want to hear because it was good for his career. His endorsement of the divisive racism of critical race theory shows that there are no limits to what he will support as long as it’s good for his career. But this time the cost may not just be thousands of dead Americans abroad, but a defenseless nation at home.
Debbie Evans says
Well, riding the school bus in Alabama and being a new student. My feelings were so hurt that I checked out of school to go back and live with my grandparents, in Fl. The treatment as a ‘ whitey,’ was also pretty much sad. Very condescending and superiority complexes., the students were cruel and unkind.