The U.S. Naval War College hosted a lecture last week featuring a trans-identifying Space Force colonel to discuss LGBT “experiences.” Titled, “Learning from the developmental journeys of LGBTQ+,” the June 17 event was co-headlined by Col. Bree Fram, a male astronautical engineer with the U.S. Space Force who proclaims to be a woman and uses “she/her” pronouns. According to his website, Fram — who acquired a master’s degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College in 2021 — is “currently stationed at the Pentagon to lead space acquisition policy development for the Department of the Air Force” and leads the branch’s “LGBTQ+ Initiatives Team.”
As noted by Federalist Executive Editor Joy Pullmann in her book, False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America, Fram has been promoted since coming out in 2016 and most of his military service took place when trans-identifying troops were supposed to be discharged from the armed forces.
“It’s fascinating to look at what LGBTQ folks have been subject to over their lives, and really, over the centuries, and how their experiences led them … to truly have those transformative moments that matter,” Fram said.
Much of the June 17 lecture focused on claims included in Fram’s new book, Forging Queer Leaders: How the LGBTQIA+ Community Creates Impact from Adversity, which, according to a book summary, “explores the unique and inspiring developmental experiences of LGBTQ+ leaders, the amazing capabilities they bring to teams, and what that means for everyone pursuing positive and inclusive organizational strategy.” Co-author and Naval War College Professor Elizabeth Cavallaro also partook in the lecture.
During his speech, Fram subtly dismissed the notion that the rising percentage of Americans identifying as LGBT is the result of social conditioning by left-wing activists, and instead claimed these high rates are “not a new phenomenon.”
“A lot of people say right now, ‘Where are all these people coming from? How all of a sudden do we have this explosion of LGBTQ people, and in many cases, LGBTQ leaders?’ Well, it’s not because they’re new,” Fram claimed. “We can go all the way back to the Greek and Roman Empires in the Western world and look at LGBTQ people flourishing and being very visible within society.”
The Space Force colonel went on to contend the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity and a “confluence of factors” led to “LGBTQ folks being pushed aside.”
Fram also seemingly attempted to normalize gender dysphoria by claiming that non-LGBT identifying individuals can relate to “transitioning” because everybody experiences change and goes through “transitory periods” at some point in their lives.
“Everybody transitions. As we look at our experiences in life of moving from one thing to another, we all go through similar things,” Fram said. “Everyone goes through these transitionary periods, and they may be really challenging … What we have to do by understanding everyone going through these transition moments is help them get through them.”
The woman-pretender further proclaimed it’s “incredibly important” for the military to support “inclusion” because “inclusion is not only a way to get the most out of person, [but] it is also a retention tool.”
“If someone does not receive that inclusion and say, ‘I belong,’ they’re gone. But when they do, it’s amazing,” Fram asserted.
The term “inclusion” is often synonymous with “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),” an offshoot of Marxist ideology that dismisses merit and discriminates based on characteristics such as skin color and sexual orientation.
Last week’s pro-LGBT speech wasn’t the first Fram has given at U.S. military institutions. Earlier this year, the Space Force colonel spoke at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he reportedly engaged in left-wing activism while in uniform.
According to Breitbart News, Fram “waded into [a] partisan speech about the 2024 presidential election” during his lecture. In an apparent reference to former President Trump’s repeal of an Obama-era policy allowing trans-identifying individuals to serve in the military, Fram said, “While I don’t have a crystal ball, I can look out and say, ‘Well, either next year things will be great, or I will be fighting for my ability to continue serving.’”
Pentagon policy specifies that “active-duty personnel may not engage in partisan political activities and all military personnel should avoid the inference that their political activities imply or appear to imply” the Defense Department’s “endorsement of a political candidate, campaign, or cause.” An Air Force spokesman defended Fram’s speech when pressed on the matter by The Daily Wire.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
It’s no secret the Biden administration has “reimagined” the U.S. military into a left-wing social experiment. From employing enlisted drag queens to boost recruitment to using taxpayer funds to host LGBT “pride” events on military installations, America’s supreme fighting force has prioritized promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) racism over addressing the biggest challenges hampering U.S. military readiness.
A recently released book unveils how this leftist ideology is also infecting the military’s service academies. In Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers, author and professor Bruce Fleming documents the pervasiveness of DEI throughout the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) and shows how the institution’s cookie-cutter bureaucracy is crippling individuality among the school’s midshipmen.
During his over 30-year teaching career at the institution, Fleming served (for a time) on the USNA Admissions Board, which evaluates applicants and decides which are ultimately admitted into the school. While on the board, he allegedly discovered that — like many civilian colleges — the academy considers applicants’ race throughout the admissions process and accepts nonwhite applicants who don’t meet the school’s academic requirements. Fleming claims that “[a]pplicants who self-identified as a member of a race the Academy wished to privilege … were briefed separately to the committee not by a white member but by a minority Navy lieutenant.”
“The choices are simple. If you want students who look a certain way but tend to score lower than others, you accept the lower scores and stop talking about your standards. Or you go with the class that can meet these standards and stop talking about the way they look,” Fleming writes. “The Naval Academy tries to square the circle by both bragging about its standards and letting in half the class to lower standards.”
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the use of race-based admissions, or “affirmative action,” by institutions of higher education is unconstitutional. That decision did not, however, address the use of such policies by U.S. military academies. Students for Fair Admissions — the plaintiff in the aforementioned SCOTUS decision — filed lawsuits against West Point and the Naval Academy over their race-based admissions policies in September and October, respectively.
Throughout his book, Fleming further notes that the USNA’s obsession with race is creating “resentment within the ranks,” and that students who speak out against the school’s DEI-focused promotion system are punished.
“What I saw at Annapolis was that nonracist white midshipmen became resentful at realizing that leadership positions were awarded to less competent midshipmen on the basis of skin color, and that they themselves, if they noted this out loud, were punished for not being with the program — which increased their resentment,” Fleming writes. “All promotions or preferences are individual ones, and ‘broadly reflective diversity’ is bought at the individual level by preferring a less competent individual with the desired skin color. If they are equally competent or more competent, the problem disappears.”
“The military shows all the problems of any top-down totalitarian state, and its members can be court-martialed for resisting,” he adds.
Throughout his career at the academy, Fleming regularly questioned the decision-making from the school’s leadership and penned several op-eds criticizing what he viewed to be its shortcomings. In 2017, for example, he wrote an article in The Federalist detailing how “upper-class students at service academies have lost faith in the system, because it’s based on lies.” Fleming said that “students realize they are cast members in a military Disneyland run for the benefit of the brass and the tourists, not the taxpayers who pay their way and want better-than-average officers.”
Fleming’s public criticisms generated ire from the academy’s bureaucratic leadership. In 2018, the school fired him over allegations of classroom impropriety filed by five students. Fleming profusely denied the accusations and appealed the decision to the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, which ordered his reinstatement to the academy in July 2019.
According to the Navy Times, Judge Mark Syska said in his ruling that the midshipman who “filed the longest complaint” had “credibility issues” and that his complaint was “greatly exaggerated — to the point of being hard to credit on certain points.” Syska additionally highlighted that the students who filed the complaints “did not generally take offense or have any actual issue with the appellant.”
“Moreover, much of the charged conduct, as noted by the investigating panel, did not appear to be actual misconduct in the context of free-wheeling classroom discussions,” Syska wrote.
While ultimately reinstated by the academy, Fleming has not been permitted to return to the classroom. The school has placed him on a “forced sabbatical,” according to the “Eyes on Annapolis” podcast, which interviewed Fleming in February.
In concluding his book, Fleming calls on military institutions such as the USNA and West Point to “[d]ial back the hype” and “stop lying about what [they] are.” Specifically, he demands these academies quit pushing mistruths about their selectivity and “quality of the students” to uphold the facade that they’re legacy institutions worthy of praise and adoration.
Our service academies are “beautiful places and, under these circumstances, duty, honor, and country could once again be primary. Sadly, in places like Annapolis as they currently exist, they no longer are,” Fleming writes. “I want them back.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
A healthy little Dutch girl without a proper name died 52 years ago. Scientists keep her kidney’s cells multiplying in a process similar to cancer. They perform increasing numbers of experiments on derivatives of this baby girl’s kidney cells to develop technologies that include taste-testing experiments for PepsiCo. Her vivisection forms “the backbone of the global gene therapy market.”
Scientists call the baby girl HEK 293. HEK stands for “human embryonic kidney,” and 293 means she was the 293rd experiment in a set.
She likely died from an elective abortion, not a miscarriage, concludes a 2006 journal article and many other scientific publications. An older gestational age and harvesting her kidney while still alive would have made her more useful for experimentation, as Planned Parenthood officials affirmed of their baby harvesting operations in 2015.
Like many medications, Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics were tested on cells made from HEK 293’s kidney. Some of the vaccines have HEK 293 cells inside them. That’s one of several reasons Capt. Rob Nelson, an Air Force chaplain, couldn’t in good conscience accept those treatments despite massive pressure from the military, he told The Federalist in a phone interview.
“I have five [children], and it breaks my heart to think of this. This girl continues to be violated as her cells are replicated over and over again,” he said.
Nelson is one of 38 military chaplains whose petition is now before U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in the case Alvarado v. Austin. The chaplains say the Department of Defense continues to defy the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act rescinding its Covid vaccine mandate, which the petition says has allowed statistically zero exceptions.
Eliminating People with Strong Ethical Boundaries from the Military
The DOD continues to violate the law by failing to rescind its punishments of conscientious objectors such as denied training and deployments required for promotions, the petition says. In addition, of course, denying soldiers’ religious exercise violates the First Amendment’s guarantee that all Americans can freely exercise their faith in their everyday lives.
That is precisely why the military has chaplains, several told The Federalist. All soldiers, their families, and civilians working for the U.S. military “have a right to believe what they believe and no one can say otherwise. It’s the same reason we can’t have a religious test for federal positions. As a chaplain, my job is to make sure the free exercise of religion is allowed, that nobody infringes upon that inalienable right,” said Army Col. Brad Lewis, a chaplain also party to the suit.
Chaplains usually help determine whether soldiers receive religious accommodations for all sorts of things, from Norse pagans wearing beards to Sikhs wearing turbans and Jews eating kosher. While the military routinely approves such waivers, it told Congress it had denied essentially all religious vaccine waiver requests from soldiers who weren’t almost retired, say the plaintiffs.
“I got in with an age waiver,” Nelson noted of his military service. “They can supposedly give wavers for all kinds of things but not a religious accommodation.”
In its Supreme Court response filed March 27, the DOD claims it has removed all punishments from soldiers imposed “solely” for conscientious objections to vaccines. It claims removing career penalties that arise from banning conscientious objectors from career-promoting training and duties has no “lawful basis.” The DOD also says that because the vaccination requirement has ended, the case is moot.
“By denying religious exemptions, what the military has done is set about the removal of people who are willing to stand on conviction,” Lewis said. He and Nelson noted this dynamic is especially dangerous if cultivated among soldiers, whose job is to kill.
Four Years Deployed to Defend Freedoms the Military Denies Him
Lewis has dedicated more than 30 years of his life to the U.S. military, including 47 months of deployment. He’s taken seven deployments to Afghanistan, six to Iraq, and an entire year away from his wife and four children in South Korea. He’s a fourth-generation Assemblies of God pastor whose father also served in the U.S. military during the Cold War.
Lewis was the senior chaplain on Hawaii’s island of Oahu when the Army recommended him as one of two chaplains in 2020 to receive instruction at the U.S. Army War College.
Image of Col. Brad Lewis by U.S. Army / public domain
War College training is the height of an Army career. It’s preparation for high-level officer assignments. While he studied there, Lewis was ordered to take a Covid vaccine. But his conscience wouldn’t let him.
The immense global pressure for an untested medical treatment alarmed Lewis’ long-developed spiritual spidey senses: “The fact that commerce and travel and careers were hinging on receipt of this vaccine, that bothered me.” It seemed to violate biblical injunctions against total obedience to any state.
Lewis and his wife spent months talking about what to do. They knew objecting could kill his career right as he hit its peak, after decades of personal and family sacrifices.
In the end, he couldn’t violate his duty to obey the still, small voice inside, Lewis says. So he filed for a religious exemption. Like almost every other solely religious exemption of the 37,000 DOD told Congress soldiers filed, it was delayed. Then it was denied. So were Lewis’ appeals. He says his superiors told him he could get vaccinated or get drummed out of the military, but while Lewis was willing to sacrifice his body for his country, he would not sacrifice his soul.
So the Army punished him, first by leaving him with no orders upon graduation from War College. That left Lewis and his wife to sit for 11 months in student housing with no assignment for Lewis while another class of students came and went.
“My career was ended by those 11 months of unrated time,” Lewis said. The inaction the Army forced him into destroyed his ratings in the military’s evaluating system. When Congress ended the vaccine mandate, the military assigned Lewis to a rural post in Maryland, where he mostly oversees civilian contractors across the world who have local pastors to tend their spiritual needs.
He says he’s asked superiors whether he will have any opportunities to use his high-level, taxpayer-provided War College training. Lewis says they repeatedly ignored the question. So he’s filed to retire and will leave the Army for good in early 2025.
“I took real strength in the idea that my faith is more important than some bureaucrat’s opinion of my faith. It sustained me, it got me through,” Lewis said.
After asking The Federalist to provide Lewis’ birth date and Social Security Number and to delay this article’s publication, U.S. Army spokeswoman Heather Hagan, who according to her email signature works in the Pentagon, finally provided this in response to a request for comment: “As a matter of policy, the Army does not comment on ongoing litigation.”
Not Just about Harvesting Killed Babies
Each conscientious objector’s reasoning is in some way unlike all the others’. There are commonalities, but they blend in individual ways, like fingerprints. That’s why religious objections to vaccines are not erased by a European Covid shot called Novavax, which its owner claims was developed and produced with no human embryo brutalization.
Army Chief of Chaplains Thomas Solhjem, who is now retired, highlighted Novavax when it came out in 2022. He ignored many soldiers’ religious objections not based on the vaccines’ use of murdered babies. They include concerns about damaging human health and reproductive capacity, ignoring natural immunity, the ethics of allegedly emergency decrees, the lack of informed consent, and heavy-handed manipulation tactics that include refusing to acknowledge any potentially legitimate conscience objections to the shots whatsoever.
It’s also unlikely any medical intervention today lacks a connection with the discarded little girl. Research done on cells descended from HEK 293’s tiny body is so “ubiquitous” now, wrote Dr. Melissa Moschella in 2020, that “Anyone who wants to completely avoid benefiting from the use of HEK 293 would effectively have to eschew the use of any medical treatments or biological knowledge developed or updated within the past forty years.” Even Tylenol was developed using cells her body generated.
Lewis said Solhjem’s video “blew my mind” because the job of a chaplain is not to negotiate people’s religious beliefs, it’s to support their exercise: “He didn’t say, ‘I stand with you. No matter what your reasons are, you have a right to believe them, and I will stand and die here defending your right.’ … It’s antithetical to what chaplains are supposed to do.”
‘The Department of Defense Is Hostile to Religion’
Several chaplains provided The Federalist “scripts” that military branches sent chaplains to pressure conscientious objectors into compliance rather than ascertain whether their objections were sincere. They include quotes from figures such as imams and preacher Russell Moore supporting vaccination.
But, for example, the Bible doesn’t say Russell Moore is its chief prophet and interpreter. While theologians and church tradition are helpful guides that Christians should take seriously, the final authority over Christianity is the Bible itself, and it says every individual is responsible before God for how he understands and applies it.
“The Department of Defense is hostile to religion,” said the chaplains’ lawyer, Art Schulcz, who is also a veteran. He said the way the DOD handled the vaccine mandate has contributed to the military’s recruiting crisis by repelling recruits and current soldiers with serious faith convictions. In response to ongoing shortfalls, U.S. military branches are lowering enlistment standards and issuing waivers of risk factors such as marijuana use.
The U.S. military’s chaplains “recruiting deficit is extreme,” wrote Rear Adm. Gregory Todd, the Navy’s chief of chaplains, last year.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Has a single member of the White House staff ever held a dying American soldier in his arms as he bled out, calling for his mother? Have any of them ever loaded the blood-soaked bodies of his wounded and killed onto a medivac helicopter and then endured sleepless nights thinking about the visits their families are about to get and the ensuing destruction of their lives and dreams?
These were the first questions that popped into my mind when I saw the report from Politico that the Biden administration is promoting the war in Ukraine because it is good for American business. I think the members of the administration could not have experienced these things because, if they had, and if they had one ounce of humanity in them, they could not possibly have promoted war on the “it’s good for business” rationale.
Apparently, multiple White House aides have been involved in this abomination because Politico is quite specific:
The White House has been quietly urging lawmakers in both parties to sell the war efforts abroad as a potential economic boom at home.
Aides have been distributing talking points to Democrats and Republicans who have been supportive of continued efforts to fund Ukraine’s resistance to make the case that doing so is good for American jobs, according to five White House aides and lawmakers familiar with the effort and granted anonymity to speak freely.
The Biden administration is fearful that it cannot sell its most recent aid package on the merits and on national security grounds, because “The talking points are an implicit recognition that the administration has work to do in selling its $106 billion foreign aid supplemental request — and that talking about it squarely under the umbrella of national security interests hasn’t done the trick,” Politico states.
The reprehensibility of these comments cannot be overstated. Biden’s administration is peopled with a number of “elites” who probably are familiar, at least in a theoretical, intellectual sense, with John Stuart Mill’s dictum, “War is an ugly thing.” But, hey, if it’s good for business, particularly in electoral swing states, let’s go for it.
I am old enough to remember how the left tarred George Bush, Dick Cheney, and others in the GOP with the argument that they wanted war because it was good for their supporters in big business. I never put any stock in these arguments because I thought no American could be so evil as to support war as a sop to big business. The Biden administration has changed my mind.
My contempt and revulsion for these people knows no bounds.
John Lucas is a retired attorney who has tried and argued a variety of cases, including before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man, later graduating from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger who fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader. He is married with five children. He and his wife now live in Virginia. John also is published at johnalucas6.substack.com.
The U.S. response to Hamas’ Nazi-like massacre of Israelis, Americans, and anyone else in its murderous path has been, almost without exception, robust. But U.S. officials are largely missing the larger picture and risking being drawn into an escalation — on the enemy’s terms.
Hamas and Hezbollah are the symptoms; Iran is the disease.
But President Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation on Oct. 19 danced around the core issue of Iran’s financing, training, and encouragement of violent, brutal forces across the region and beyond, as well as its nuclear missile program. Thus, the gathering might of the U.S. Navy off the coast of Israel in the form of two aircraft carrier strike groups and a Marine Expeditionary Unit betrays unimaginative, linear thinking.
If used, American firepower would augment Israel’s own considerable military force. In theory, this threat helps to deter Hezbollah from unleashing its arsenal of 100,000 missiles on Israel, many of them sophisticated.
But, like Hamas, Hezbollah is expert at digging. They hide their missile launchers in an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers — all guarded by an air defense network that is likely to get lucky enough times to raise the specter of captured American pilots.
If the incremental addition of American airpower is helpful to the pending effort to destroy Hamas while deterring a wider conflict, that role can more than adequately be filled by the U.S. Air Force. The U.S. Navy should instead be concentrating 2,000 miles to the east in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. There, the U.S. Navy would be playing to its unambiguous strength, enforcing sanctions against Iran by controlling the sea lines of communication that Iran depends on to generate the cash for its empire of terror.
Unfortunately, this would require a Biden administration that was both imaginative and strategic — and not in the thrall of a recently revealed Iranian influence operation that managed to place several advisors friendly to the Iranian mullahs in key national security positions since the Obama administration. Chief among these, Robert Malley, a longtime friend of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and an architect of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, a deal that focused exclusively on Iran’s nuclear program, rewarding the mullahs with cash and sanctions relief while greenlighting their missile program and global support for terror.
Iran’s Nuclear Program
Instead, Biden’s systematic appeasement of Iran, a continuation of the Obama-era policy that weirdly sought to use Iran as a counter to perceived Israeli intransigence on the Palestinian problem, has resumed. Up until the gruesome events of Oct. 7, Biden’s national security team was willfully blind to Iran’s bloody history of sponsoring terror and its determined drive to produce nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them.
As a result, U.N. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear, missile, and drone program — never well enforced by Biden — expired on Oct. 18 with the U.S. announcing its own unilateral set of sanctions. The U.S. continues to pretend these efforts are somehow slowing Iran’s drive to push its nuclear program to completion, while Russian use of Iranian combat drones in Ukraine reveals the prior sanctions regime as inadequate to the task.
Reagan-Era Lessons
The U.S. never fully grappled with the Iranian theocracy after the shah was toppled in 1979. During the Cold War, it was assumed that the Soviet Union would come to Iran’s aid and that the military cost of defeating the regime would be too high. Instead, the U.S. was content to see Iran tied down in a bloody stalemate against Iraq after the latter invaded in 1980.
As the war started to threaten oil exports out of the Gulf, America responded by providing a U.S. Navy escort to six Kuwaiti-owned super tankers in July 1987. After an escorting U.S. Navy ship struck a mine on April 14, 1988, the Reagan administration responded only four days later with Operation Praying Mantis. It was the Navy’s largest combat action since World War II, sinking an Iranian guided missile frigate, crippling a second, sinking four other boats, and destroying two militarized oil platforms at the cost of one helicopter with two crew lost.
The operation was thoroughly wargamed a year before, when it was determined that an unambiguously aggressive response to Iran would likely prevent the conflict from escalating. In other words, a disproportionate response would rob Iran of the ability to control the timing and mode of escalation, reducing U.S. casualties and preserving the peace.
Applying Force
This lesson from the Reagan era opens up a final consideration. Rather than following through on the foolish precedent of incentivizing hostage-taking via negotiation and cash payments, America should ditch the carrots and pick up the stick.
Imagine the transformative discussion over the current hostage crisis — and the forestalling of future hostage-taking by Iran and its proxies — if the U.S. were to announce that every hostage taken is worth $1 billion (or $1.171 billion if we wish to account for Bidenflation). That amount would be deducted from seized Iranian assets or taken from oil tankers filled with Iranian oil. The proceeds would compensate hostages and their families, with the remainder used to replenish the Pentagon’s waning stocks of armaments.
This is exactly the kind of naval power application the U.S. Navy was built for. Unfortunately, the radical cadres infesting the Biden administration’s national security staff would never allow such an idea to reach the desk of our cognitively impaired commander-in-chief.
Now that Congress has funded the federal government for the next month and a half, the White House and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are hard at work looking for ways to pour more U.S. taxpayer money into Ukraine’s forever war with Russia.
During a White House press briefing on Monday, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre fretted that the administration is running out of the money needed to bankroll its continuing proxy war with Moscow. Government officials estimate there is approximately $6 billion remaining in military funds for Ukraine.
“It is enough to — for us to meet the — meet Ukraine’s urgent battlefield needs for a bit — for a bit longer,” Jean-Pierre told reporters.
Even though a majority of Americans oppose continued U.S. funding for Ukraine, congressional Democrats spent a significant portion of this past weekend’s spending fight arguing that more aid be shipped to the Eastern European nation. It was thanks to House Republicans and a handful of GOP senators that Congress ultimately approved a 45-day continuing resolution devoid of such funding.
Of course, this hasn’t stopped President Joe Biden or congressional leadership from professing their support for shipping more U.S. tax dollars to Ukraine. While discussing the spending fight, Biden suggested he’d reached an agreement with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to continue funding the conflict. Despite pushing back on the president’s insinuation that a deal had been made, McCarthy did proclaim to reporters on Monday that he’s “always supported arming Ukraine” and “believe[s] Ukraine is very important.”
Congress and the Biden administration committed more than $113 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars to Ukraine in 2022, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
But while Washington overzealously focuses on Ukraine’s military, concerns affecting America’s own armed forces have gone by the wayside. On Thursday, the U.S. Marine Corps announced it is lowering its uniform standards to compensate for a shortage of camouflage attire typically worn by service members. According to Commandant Gen. Eric Smith, local battalions are “authorized” to wear alternate attire contrary to Marine regulations to “mitigate” an ongoing manufacturing shortfall that’s left service members struggling to acquire woodland-patterned “cammies.”
“What we cannot have is a situation where a Marine is wearing unserviceable cammies, because that looks bad for the Corps, and we can’t have a situation where that Marine is being given a hard time about those unserviceable cammies. We’re going to get this fixed, Marines, but it’s going to take a little patience,” Smith said, adding that the problem won’t be fixed until the fall of 2024.
According to the Marine Corps Times, service members normally receive “three sets of woodland cammies and two sets of desert cammies.” Due to the ongoing shortage, however, the service has been providing Marines “two woodland sets and one desert set.” Meanwhile, new enlistees have reportedly been forced to undergo “entry-level training in flame-resistant organizational gear,” which are “typically reserved for deployments,” to compensate for the shortages.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
“US military asks the public for help finding its missing F-35 fighter jet after its pilot had to eject while training over South Carolina.”
While the above Insider headline may sound like a comedic piece straight from the pages of The Babylon Bee, it’s not. The U.S. military actually publicly claimed it had lost a multi-million-dollar fighter jet.
The loss occurred Sunday following an alleged “mishap” that required the aircraft’s pilot to eject. The F-35 purportedly kept on flying. It wasn’t until Monday evening — a day after Joint Base Charleston requested the public’s assistance in finding the missing jet — that military officials announced they had discovered a debris field “about two hours northeast” of the base.
The debacle has since prompted the Marine Corps’ acting commandant, Eric Smith, to issue a “two-day stand-down” order for all military aviation units “both inside and outside of the United States.”
A Sign of Decline
This episode raises so many questions. For one, how does the U.S. military — the supposed best and most advanced fighting force on the planet — lose a highly-valued asset, especially over U.S. soil?
Why are military bases such as Joint Base Charleston acting as landing pads for commercial planes transporting members of the People’s Republic of China — the very government trying to topple the United States as the world’s hegemon?
While it’s improbable any of these questions will actually be answered to the public’s satisfaction, the likely answers probably wouldn’t reverse Americans’ waning confidence in the ability of U.S. military leadership to defend the American homeland. Nor should they.
This week’s fighter jet fiasco is just one example of many showcasing a U.S. military in severe institutional decline. Instead of focusing on how to win wars — which should be the sole purpose of any military — top Pentagon brass have since at least the Clinton administration treated the service as one giant, left-wing social experiment.
This is a drag queen that the Biden admin hired to try to recruit servicemembers. Is this supposed to convince people to join the military? pic.twitter.com/5UHMJvNSXJ
Through its adoption and outright promotion of neo-Marxist ideologies including DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), the military has sacrificed efficiency, ruthlessness, and strength for LGBTcelebrations, racial politics, and climate alarmism. A look into the backgrounds of President Biden’s manymilitarynomineesshows the primary focus of the Pentagon’s leading figures isn’t defeating communist China or protecting Americans from other international threats, it’s crafting a “diverse” and “inclusive” social club where leftist lunacy is treated as gospel and conservative “wrongthink” as extreme.
Look no further than the Pentagon’s abortion policy, which violates U.S. law in using taxpayer money to pay for female military members’ travel expenses to kill their unborn child. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Democrats have baselessly claimed for months that Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s slow-walking of Biden’s military nominees in protest of the policy harms “military readiness.”
If that’s true, then why hasn’t the Pentagon dropped its policy?
If “readiness” is such a major concern, why did the military fire thousands of service members who chose not to get an experimental shot?
And why isn’t Democrat Chuck Schumer using his power as Senate majority leader to approve Biden’s supposedly important nominees?
The reason, as tacitly admitted by the heads of the Army, Air Force, and Navy, is that taxpayer-funded abortions are a sacrament of the leftist religion so must be preserved at all costs. Coupled with decades of failed military adventurism and nation-building like that conducted in Afghanistan, it’s no wonder the U.S. military is facing the worst recruiting crisissince shifting to an all-volunteer force in 1973.
A High Price to Pay
The Marxist hijacking of America’s military isn’t an accident; it’s an intentional act contributing to the left’s greater plan to re-invent society. For the left, the military is just another piece on the American chessboard to coopt. It’s why the military so vigorously promotes Marxism and penalizes conservative beliefs: to dissuade the God and America-loving patriots who have largely staffed it for generations from joining or remaining in service.
As witnessed many times before, however, the leftist takeover of institutions has its costs. Only America’s “rainbow” military could cost our country its security and well-being.
For decades, the U.S. military has prevented widespread global conflict, deterring aggression from hostile actors and maintaining peace through strength. If the world’s leading aggressors no longer view America as the dominant military power, where does that leave us? If the U.S. gets dragged into a war with a rival power, can we be confident our “rainbow” fighting force can get the job done? The withdrawal from Afghanistan and growing quagmire in Ukraine atop the failed war in Iraq and our military’s distraction into identity politics don’t bode well.
Much like the missing F-35, our nation’s military is lost with no sense of direction or purpose, and those faithfully committed to the American cause are forced to bail out. Let us hope and pray for new military leadership before it’s too late.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
The theme of my career over the past year has been the transition of departing military service and reintegrating among the civilian populace. As I approached this season, I have heard one particular phrase frequently circulated among much of corporate communication: “Bring your authentic self to work.”
But more recently I have heard cautions for those of us in uniform to be anything but open as we return to the society from which we were drawn. I find this deeply concerning. The nation should beware of prioritizing deception as social currency.
Last summer I began attending the transition briefings required prior to separation from the service. At one particular event, a retired military man — now working for a large national company — warned us that it’s very important to keep a low social media profile because of perceptual risk from hiring managers. He told of unfriending his sister on Facebook because he didn’t want anyone from his workplace to associate them with each other. That moment got my attention.
If the sister posts deviant content, I would probably keep some distance in online spaces for the sake of my sanity. But what if the sister is merely someone who expresses facts that just happen to be inconvenient to the current sociopolitical moment? We have seen time and again that facts disputed by corporate media, social media companies, and government officials frequently turn out to be true.
The call to sacrificially appease the human resources syndicate renewed itself in another employment seminar I attended this year. Again, I encountered the caution through a LinkedIn discussion. I was warned that employers fear that an employee who expresses a thought on his or her own time might also express a thought in the workplace. Such thinking from clearly well-intentioned people seems backward to me, as if we should not encounter ideas and ways of thinking that might challenge our own.
People of faith-directed moral principles routinely encounter rhetoric that is contrary to their own beliefs and sometimes condescending. The reality is that many companies, corporations, and government institutions tolerate “politically correct” expressions in the workplace while shaming voices aligned with a traditional worldview. My time in the U.S. Army contains such instances, and I’m not alone.
This is in spite of protections offered by the U.S. Constitution, civil law, and military regulation. Culture and political sway always trump the rules. When you look at where people are being pressured, disciplined, or fired for sharing their beliefs at work, it is usually an incident of discrimination against speaking the truth by military commanders or civilian managers who have adopted a form of leftist social orthodoxy.
Part of the argument for why we should present as neutral in online spaces revolves around a belief that people cannot be taught how to engage productively on tough issues. Society has lost the ability to think, reason, and respectfully debate. Shall we then remove anything related to thinking skills from educational curriculum? The point of identifying a deficiency is so that it can be addressed. We should not accept a lack of skills in dialogue and thought as normal and then strike them from the list of disciplines to be pursued. Because one generation has not been taught something important does not mean people should abandon it entirely.
Rather than calling for an end to societal discourse, we should work to recapture the skill. I am not advocating that we bring cable news-style fights to the job site or that everyone abandons all expressive caution, manner, and restraint. But we must end the fear and spirals of silence that have become too frequent across workplaces, especially for workers who hold to a morality that was understood to be normal until 15 minutes ago.
By overusing a mantra that demands we avoid talking about religion or politics at the dinner table, we have robbed entire generations of the chance to develop the intellectual discipline that is foundational to reasoning and thought. These skills were expected of all citizens in the early republic. The nation’s current deficit in the tools of discourse paved the way for a cultural capture of the West at the hands of confessional Marxists. In their own words, such people aim to deconstruct and dismantle rather than defend and preserve.
Deliberately or unwittingly, those who argue in favor of self-neutrality demonstrate a worldview that places all power and personal allegiance in the hands of employers. Of course, there is wisdom in avoiding individuals who demonstrate a lack of restraint or courtesy in their manner of expression. But telling people that their employment is purchased with a lifestyle of silence is an elevation of employer to magistrate and priest. It turns employees into quieted servants and enables a soft social credit system that reduces human beings to machines. Such thinking is among the reasons my transition is focused on finding a mission rather than a corporate role.
The Greek general and politician Pericles is quoted as saying, “We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own affairs; we say that he has no business here at all.” The problem is not so much that managers have an aversion to politics. It is that secularists generally have an aversion to ideas that contradict the prevailing winds of culture. They live convinced that policy advocacy on matters in alignment with their belief is not a matter of politics but of principle. The two, however, are inseparable. When one tells you to keep your principles to yourself, that itself is an ideological competitor’s political act of silencing you.
Beliefs turn into expressed ideas, which beget social doctrines. The First Amendment is of little meaning if we make it inferior to social demands of the moment. As a nation, we should beware of allowing momentary fears to become anchored going forward, and we should refuse to cede moral principles to satisfy the increasingly leftist human resources syndicate.
Chase Spears is a retiring U.S. Army officer, concluding a 20-year career in military public affairs. His opinions are his own and should not be construed to be those of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, U.S. Government, or any other affiliated agencies.
An Air Force colonel nominated by President Joe Biden once claimed that “white colonels” are the “biggest barriers” to addressing so-called “racial injustice” in the U.S. military, according to a new report.
On Thursday, The Daily Signal’s Rob Bluey reported that Col. Benjamin Jonsson, who is “currently awaiting promotion to brigadier general,” penned an article in the Air Force Times weeks after George Floyd’s death lamenting his fellow white airmen don’t go along with leftist talking points about so-called “racial injustice” in the U.S. armed forces.
“As white colonels, you and I are the biggest barriers to change if we do not personally address racial injustice in our Air Force. Defensiveness is a predictable response by white people to any discussion of racial injustice. White colonels are no exception,” Jonsson wrote. “We are largely blind to institutional racism, and we take offense to any suggestion that our system advantaged us at the expense of others.”
Jonsson went on claim he “drew attention” to the notion that “racial tension remains an important issue to address” while speaking with two white colonels. According to Jonsson, his “introduction of race into the conversation created social discomfort,” allegedly causing both service members to “ameliorate” the situation “with humor.” He furthermore admonished a fellow white colonel who purportedly expressed the meritocratic sentiment that “when anyone joins the Air Force, they need to adopt the culture of the Air Force [and] that [the branch] should not make cultural accommodations.”
“By obscuring any cultural differences in the Air Force, he excused himself from the need to dig into the underlying issue of racial disparity,” Jonsson regurgitated the leftist talking points.
But Jonsson wasn’t quite finished demanding his fellow service members view the world through a racial lens. At the end of his article, the Air Force colonel recommended airmen develop a “game plan” to break so-called “invisible barriers” in the military by reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, a book that promotes divisive ideologies such as critical race theory (CRT).
“Dear white colonel, it is time to give a damn. Aim High,” he added.
The Air Force Times article is hardly the only incident in which Jonsson has pushed the military to adopt ideas saturated in so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), a poisonous left-wing framework that dismisses merit and instead discriminates based on characteristics such as skin color and sex.
In a December 2020 video commemorating the service of a Tuskegee Airman, Jonsson said the celebration gives the Air Force a chance to “acknowledge that there’s still progress that we need to make as a service.”
“There’s still barriers, more invisible barriers, that some of our airmen from underrepresented groups … still feel in their service,” Jonsson claimed. “We’re aggressively knocking down those barriers.”
According to a September 2022 Fox News report, the Air Force Academy — where Jonsson had apparently begun serving as vice superintendent in August 2022 — has regularly forced cadets to undergo DEI instruction. In one slideshow titled, “Diversity & Inclusion: What it is, why we care, & what we can do,” cadets are told to utilize words that “include all genders” and avoid using terms such as “mom,” “dad,” and “colorblind.”
An Air Force cadet writing under a pseudonym detailed in the Washington Examiner earlier this summer his experiences with the academy’s embrace of “leftist ideologies.” The cadet specifically noted how “critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings [are] being forced upon us by academy leadership” and that in doing so, the school has “divided the cadet wing from within, in a profession where unity is essential.”
Jonsson’s apparent infatuation with CRT and DEI ideologies further highlights the importance of Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s ongoing bid to force individual votes on Biden’s military appointees. Using his role on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tuberville has been slowing down military personnel moves that require Senate confirmation to protest the Pentagon’s use of taxpayer money to cover service members’ travel expenses to get abortions.
To be clear, Tuberville is not blocking votes, but is forcing the Armed Services Committee to vote on each nomination individually rather than voting “en masse on large numbers of nominations.” The Alabama senator has since faced numerous attacks from Democrats and establishment Republicans, many of whom have baselessly claimed his protest is harming “military readiness.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Senate Republicans grilled Gen. Charles Q. Brown over racial politics and transgenderism throughout the U.S. military during a committee confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Brown, who serves as Air Force chief of staff, was nominated by President Joe Biden to replace Gen. Mark Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in May.
Among the more contentious issues raised during Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing was an August 2022 Air Force memo Brown signed, directing the Air Force Academy and Air Education and Training Command to “develop a diversity and inclusion outreach plan” aimed at “achieving a force more representative of our Nation.” When pressed on the memo by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., Brown claimed the recruiting targets stratified by race and sex in the memo are based “on application goals, not the make-up of the force,” and that “those numbers are based on the demographics of the nation.”
As The Federalist previously reported, Brown has a documented history of supporting the same so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) ideology wreaking havoc on the U.S. military. DEI initiatives employ a divisive and poisonous ideology dismissive of merit to discriminate based on characteristics such as skin color and sexual attraction.
While participating in a virtual discussion hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in November 2020, for instance, Brown indicated that “[a]t the higher level of the Air Force, diversity ha[d] moved to the forefront of personnel decisions such as promotions and hiring.” During the same event, the Air Force general also admitted to using his post to increase opportunities for so-called “diverse candidates” in the Air Force, saying he “hire[d] for diversity” when building his staff.
Brown has also previously pushed back against congressional Republicans who have expressed concerns about the Biden administration’s attempt to spread DEI instruction throughout the military.
“This administration has infused abortion politics into our military, Covid politics into our military, DEI politics into our military, and it is a cancer on the best military in the history of the world. Those men and women deserve better than this,” Schmitt said. “I believe we … ought to be recruiting in various areas to make sure we have the best and the brightest from every community. … But that’s not what DEI is.”
Schmitt further admonished DEI as “an ideology based in cultural Marxism” and expressed concerns about how the military can continue to have leadership that advocates for “this divisive policy.”
The Center for Military Readiness, a public policy group that analyzes military matters, sent a letter to committee members on Monday, encouraging them to press Brown on issues such as “[r]acial discrimination known to exist in military service academy admissions” and “[m]andates to increase percentages of minority persons, while consciously reducing non-minority (white males) in aviation and other demanding occupations,” among other things.
Schmitt also raised the issue of the more than 8,000 U.S. service members kicked out of the military for not getting the experimental Covid jab due to medical or religious reasons. When pressed on how he would personally recruit these individuals back into service, Brown said he would “provide them the opportunity to re-apply.”
“I just don’t think that’s good enough,” Schmitt replied. “We did a great disservice to this country by firing people because they made that decision. I think they ought to be reinstated with rank and backpay. I have not heard that from anybody that’s come before this committee.”
Another problem raised during the hearing was transgenderism in the military. Shortly after his inauguration, Biden issued an executive order allowing transgender-identifying individuals to serve in the U.S. armed forces, marking a policy reversal from that of the Trump administration.
During his line of questioning, Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., referenced an alleged “young woman in the South Dakota National Guard [who] experienced a situation at basic training where she was sleeping in open bays and showering” with female-identifying males who had not undergone surgery, “but were documented as females because they had begun the drug therapy process.”
According to Rounds, this 18-year-old woman “was uncomfortable with her situation but had limited options on how to deal with it” because “she feared she’d be targeted for retaliation.” When asked how he would handle such issues as Joint Chiefs chair, Brown didn’t offer a specific answer, instead saying that “as you’re being inclusive, you also don’t want to make other individuals uncomfortable” and that if confirmed, he would “take a look to see if [the military] can improve on how [it] approach[es] situations like this.”
Meanwhile, several Democrats spent their time attacking fellow committee member Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., who has been holding up Biden’s DOD civilian and general flag officer nominees in response to the Pentagon’s radical abortion policies. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd previously reported, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “announced in February that the taxpayer-funded Pentagon would grant up to three weeks of paid time off and travel for U.S. military members and their family members to obtain abortions.”
According to Tuberville, the policy — which “would subsidize thousands of ‘non-covered abortions‘” without congressional authorization or taxpayer approval — is “immoral and arguably illegal.”
“One of my colleagues is exercising a prerogative to place a hold on 250 generals and flag officers. I’m unaware of anything that they have done … that would warrant them being disrespected or punished or delayed in their careers,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said in reference to Tuberville. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., also criticized Tuberville, with Rosen indirectly accusing the Alabama senator of partaking in an “extreme, anti-choice agenda.”
A committee vote on Brown’s confirmation will be held at a later date.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
The U.S. military issued a series of social media posts commemorating LGBT-themed “diversity” on the same weekend millions of Americans came together to celebrate the nation’s founding.
The first of such incidents occurred on Sunday when the Defense Department’s official Twitter account posted a June 22 article detailing the “coming out journey” of U.S. Army Maj. Rachel Jones, a man who identifies as a “transgender female.” In a tweet accompanying the first post, the agency claimed that Jones “faced deep-rooted challenges on her path to self-acceptance” and that his “resilience shines as a hope for others facing similar struggles.”
Jones faced deep-rooted challenges on her path to self-acceptance. In a world where LGBTQ+ voices were often marginalized, she battled depression and contemplated suicide. Today, her resilience shines as a hope for others facing similar struggles.
— Department of Defense 🇺🇸 (@DeptofDefense) July 2, 2023
You do not become a Major overnight. This confused individual has been in Army leadership for some time. Think that through. How many more of these “confused” people do we haev in our military?
You know our enemies are laughing themselves silly with this knowledge that America has sexually confused, obsessed, leaders in its forces. Does that sound prepared for war to you?
In the attached article — which was published on the Army’s official website — Jones described his process of “accept[ing] and lov[ing]” himself and further claimed it “was very risky to [his] career to be seen in public as a transwoman” during the Trump administration when transgender-identifying individuals were not permitted to openly serve in the military. Upon taking office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order reversing the policy, which allowed Jones to “come out publicly as transgender” to his colleagues.
“People here have been amazing. I know how lucky I am to work in an organization with such acceptance and everyone here has been really supportive,” Jones said. “I was initially a bit fearful of coming out as my true self and how I would be perceived, but I had nothing to worry about.”
To commemorate “pride month,” Jones also recorded a video claiming that for him, “pride” is about “celebrating that diversity is our strength, as a nation and as an Army.”
US Army Major “Rachel” Jones on diversity in the military 🤡 🌎
— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today (@JordanSchachtel) July 1, 2023
A similar incident exemplifying the military’s increased focus on so-called “diversity” occurred on Friday and Sunday, when the U.S. Navy posted two separate Instagram clips highlighting the importance of removing alleged “barriers” for LGBT service members’ “total inclusion” in the fleet.
“It’s a necessary effort to make sure that the chief of naval operation and our operational commanders are getting the very best from the 6 to 8 to 10 percent of our force that identifies as LGBTQ+,” said Rear Admiral Mike Brown in the Friday clip.
I am a Combat Marine Veteran. There is no possible way for me to trust anyone like this into combat. As adults they are confused about the way they “feel”, makes every other aspect of their lives questionable.
When asked in the second video what it means to have a “diverse force,” Brown further claimed it’s important for the Navy to be “inclusive of all parts of the American population.”
“Inclusion means recognizing that we have a diverse force and getting the most of every part of our force, every individual sailor,” Brown said. ”We will not be able to compete and win if we don’t continue to pull from the amazing talent that resides in every corner of the United States, harness that talent, respect it, and use it.”
It’s worth mentioning that both the Army and Navy are expected to miss their recruiting goals for the 2023 fiscal year.
Since Biden’s inauguration, the Defense Department has seemingly ramped up its push for military leadership to adopt discriminatory “DEI” ideology. DEI — which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion — is a divisive and poisonous ideology that dismisses merit to discriminate based on characteristics such as skin color and sexual preferences. Individuals who qualify for a certain position due to their merits but don’t meet the discriminating entity’s goal of being more “diverse” are passed over in favor of those who meet the preferred identitarian standards.
Last month, for instance, the Air Force went all out to celebrate “pride month” by authorizing the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to cover the travel costs for service members seeking to attend the branch’s June “pride” events. Several Air Force bases also held LGBT-related events on their respective grounds last month.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Buyers from the People’s Republic of China purchased $6.1 billion in real estate last year, the most of any foreign buyer. Many of these purchases over the past few years have been of farmland or ranchland near U.S. military bases.
Revelations from a groundbreaking exclusive CNN story published on July 23 about telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei installed in rural America suggest that Chinese land purchases could pose a severe national security threat as well.
CNN chronicles the Chinese government’s more than decade-long effort to establish a massive electronic intelligence and jamming capability in the U.S. adjacent to military installations and in Washington, D.C. Such a system could deliver a crippling electronic Pearl Harbor against American nuclear weapons systems and strategic communications vital to deterring and defeating a military surprise attack. The report details how China’s state-supported telecommunications giants, Huawei and ZTE, sold cell tower equipment and routers, often at a loss, to small, rural telecommunications providers in the heartland. Much of the made-in-China equipment was installed adjacent to the land-based leg of America’s nuclear triad — the 400 Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) — in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
Chinese telecommunications equipment presents four threats:
real-time communications intelligence,
real-time imagery intelligence,
offensive signals jamming,
and internet attacks.
In the age of software reprogrammable digital electronics, cell tower transmitters and receivers can be remotely reconfigured to listen to nearby military transmissions. Cell tower transmitters can be ordered to broadcast on certain frequencies used by the military, a tactic known as jamming. Similarly, cell towers’ connectivity to the internet could be used to overwhelm or degrade internet service in the early hours of a conflict. Many of the cell towers installed cameras in recent years to provide real-time traffic and weather conditions. Many of these cameras also monitor traffic around sensitive U.S. military installations.
The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into this threat was so sensitive that senior policymakers in the White House and Congress weren’t told until 2019. Soon after, the Federal Communications Commission issued a rule banning small telecoms from using certain kinds of Chinese manufactured equipment. In 2020, Congress appropriated $1.9 billion to rip out and replace about 24,000 pieces of Huawei and ZTE equipment in rural America. But none of it has yet been removed, and carriers insist that the federal government is $3 billion short of making them whole. Chinese telecommunications equipment remains a ticking timebomb, with resistance to its removal ranging from economic justifications to cries of xenophobia.
How did we get here? The Chinese Communist Party practices strategic mercantilism, fostering key technologies with dual-use civilian and military applications while driving competing industries in other nations out of business.
In the 1970s, the world’s two largest manufacturers of telecommunications gear were headquartered in the U.S.: Western Electric and ITT. Less than two dozen years ago, the two largest were U.S.-based Lucent and Canada’s Nortel. America saw its manufacturing dominance slip from producing one-third of the world’s telecom equipment in 1997 to barely more than one-tenth today. The People’s Republic of China played a key role in that decline. In 1979, China declared its telecommunications industry as strategic and stated that it required “absolute control.” In 1982, China imported 100 percent of its telecommunications equipment. By 2000, it was self-sufficient, importing no foreign equipment.
China’s path to dominance was simple: It leveraged Western demand for quarterly profits by telling foreign suppliers that they had to manufacture the products they sold to China in joint ventures with Chinese firms. China then built its supply chain to provide the inputs for these joint ventures as well as to steal the intellectual property with the goal of eventually being able to make high-end equipment. The result is that today, U.S. telecommunications service providers rely almost entirely on Chinese or European suppliers—with China routinely offering cheaper prices.
The Importance of Real Estate
Voluntarily purchasing problematic Chinese equipment is one thing, but what happens when China controls real estate near military bases or important government facilities?
An odd 2017 deal illustrates the importance of strategic real estate. That year, China offered to pay the entire $100 million cost to build the National China Garden on 12 acres at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. Concerns voiced by American counterintelligence officials resulted in the project being rejected just before construction was due to begin. Among their misgivings: The proposed pagoda on one of D.C.’s highest points would be built from materials shipped to the U.S. in diplomatic pouches, meaning no import inspections.
This Chinese project attracted attention because it was on federal land in the nation’s capital. On the other hand, purchases of land in private transactions frequently escape attention until after the fact.
But the $2.6 million land purchase is a good thing, some might argue. The Chinese firm plans to invest another $700 million in the area and generate 200 jobs—besides, America has a trade deficit with China, and those dollars must go somewhere, so why not see them reinvested in the U.S.? Further, it’s not like the Chinese can pack up American land and take it back to China with them. And, while some express concern about China owning agricultural land (Chinese interests now own 192,000 agricultural acres worth almost $2 billion), even if China were to decide to divert all production to China or cease agricultural operations, production could easily be restarted.
The CCP Problem
But what most Americans don’t know is that every Chinese company with 50 or more employees must have a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official embedded in it. This CCP political officer is a looming presence in any firm hailing from a nation with no rule of law other than what CCP officials say it is. Thus, while the Fufeng Group likely has legitimate business purposes for investing in Grand Forks, so too does the CCP have strategic military purposes for using Fufeng’s North Dakota base for its own purposes.
In April, U.S. Air Force Major Jeremy Fox wrote an unofficial memo highlighting concerns that the Grand Forks perch was well sited to intercept military communications between “unmanned air systems” and “space-based assets.” A USAF spokesman subsequently downplayed Major Fox’s concerns as his “personal assessment of potential vulnerabilities.”
Similar concerns have been expressed about the purchase of a 130,000-acre ranch on the border with Mexico near Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas. The site is home to a wind turbine project that, due to its connection with the Texas grid, could be used to disrupt the state’s electric system. Further, the land—which features a large airstrip, as do many Texas ranches—could be used to coordinate activities with the transnational drug cartels across the border.
In both cases, in North Dakota and in Texas—and on any other large agricultural or industrial facility—equipment might be positioned for purposes other than purely commercial reasons. And, since Chinese nationals and companies must obey the CCP, if they don’t cooperate, they risk losing everything up to and including their freedom and their lives.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told CNN that the FBI opens a new China counterintelligence investigation every 12 hours with about 2,000 active investigations, excluding cyber theft, which is a criminal matter.
Retired U.S. Navy Capt. James “Kimo” Fanell was the chief of intelligence for the Pacific Fleet and notes that large parcels of land or industrial sites could host signals intelligence or electronic warfare equipment such as jammers. He observed, “While our Customs inspectors are hardworking people, they’re overloaded, especially today with the Biden administration’s de facto open border policies. The idea that a strategic adversary could buy land near U.S. military bases does not pass the commonsense test.” He added, “We’ve got to do better as a nation to defend our citizens from these kinds of obvious threats.”
Given the sluggishness of the American response to the grave danger posed by communist China—a response slowed over fears of being accused of racism or by economic arguments made by well-funded lobbyists for Chinese interests or U.S. multinationals—it doesn’t take much to imagine the varied nature of attacks we might see on the homeland during the first few days of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
The time for talk is over; we need action.
Chuck DeVore is Chief National Initiatives Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a former California legislator, special assistant for foreign affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon, and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army (retired) Reserve. He’s the author of two books, “The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America,” and “China Attacks,” a novel.
As the battle against the Islamic State is spreading beyond the areas of Syria and Iraq, we find that the Islamists are expanding their operations. We have been told on several occasions that the group was losing ground and desperate. But this news is making that harder to believe.
How can we say that they are desperate or losing ground while they are expanding their reach and influence?
NBC News has exclusively obtained a map showing the global expansion of the terror group.
The map is part of a classified briefing document received by the White House dated “August 2016” and prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center. It shows a stunning three-fold increase in the number of places around the globe where ISIS is operating.
U.S. State Department documents indicated that in 2014, when the U.S. military began its campaign to destroy the extremists, there were only seven nations in which the fledgling state was operating.
This represents an expansion. And this expansion is growing like cancer. There are areas that the group is operating, and we are combating them. But there are areas that we have not even begun to confront the Islamists.
The problem is they are using their religion to spread from one country to the next. It is possible that they are going to be operating in almost every Muslim country soon. And there is little chance that we can keep up with the rate of expansion.
Though our military is doing all that it is allowed to by our politicians, there seems to be nothing that they can do about the expansion that is occurring. And this makes the likelihood of things worsening in America and Europe.
There has been an increase in the number of tragedies involving military aircraft under the Obama administration. One of these tragedies occurred on Jan. 14, when two CH-53E Sea Stallion helicopters collided while training off the coast of Hawaii, killing 12 Marines.
The Washington Examiner reported that the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert Neller, has stated that the increase in these accidents has been caused by the budget cuts implemented by the Obama administration.
These budget cuts limit the number of aircraft available for training and reduce the number of hours that pilots can train in existing aircraft.
This leads to a predictable increase in accidents, as well as an armed force that may not be fully ready for future combat scenarios.
“We track this very closely and the simple fact is we don’t have enough airplanes to meet training requirements for the entire force,” Neller stated during a hearing on the 2017 budget request for the armed services.
These budget cuts also lead to less maintenance on aircraft because there simply isn’t enough money.
“The real bill payer for underfunded readiness is lost lives. I think that helps bring it into context for all of us,” stated Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, during his opening statement.
The Obama administration has absolutely gutted the military over the past several years. Instead of giving the military the resources needed to win a war, the Obama administration has sent them into combat underfunded, ill-equipped and unprepared.
It is absolutely despicable that President Barack Obama has overseen the sharpest decline in our military’s preparedness since before World War II.
It’s too late now, but in a few months we can elect a Republican who will make sure that the military has what it needs to win wars and that money is never an issue.
Image: Report suggests al Qaeda militants are being awarded US contracts
A new independent report reveals that lucrative U.S. military contracts have been granted to militant groups in Afghanistan with direct connections to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
The report, submitted to Congress by the U.S. Army Suspension and Debarment Office, states that American officials are citing “due process rights” as a reason not to cancel the agreements with the extremists.
A Bloomberg article quotes John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, who notes:
“I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters, but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract,”
The report continues:
An audit showed that after 16 months, none of the agency’s essential program objectives have been reached and the money spent has mostly financed workshops and training sessions. The project is aimed at bolstering Afghanistan’s government before troop withdrawals planned for next year.
“It’s troubling that after 16 months, this program has not issued its first community grant,” Sopko said. “Rather, it has spent almost $50 million, about a quarter of the total program budget, on conferences, overhead and workshops.”
Regarding the 43 cases of contractors with militant connections, Sopko said the Army should “enforce the rule of common sense” in its suspension and debarment program.
“They may be enemies of the United States but that is not enough to keep them from getting government contracts,” according to the agency’s report.
So there you have it, while the Obama administration is funding, equipping, and training al Qaeda extremists in Syria to overthrow the Assad government, it is also awarding contracts to al Qaeda after a decade plus long war against “the terrorists” in Afghanistan.
Obama truly is the global head of Al Qaeda – bankrolling, arming and equipping terrorists around the world in order to achieve his administration’s geopolitical objectives – while simultaneously invoking the threat of terrorists domestically to destroy the bill of rights.
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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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and we are combating them. But there are areas that we have not even begun to confront the Islamists.
There has been an increase in the number of tragedies involving military aircraft under the Obama administration. One of these tragedies occurred on Jan. 14, when two CH-53E Sea Stallion helicopters collided while training off the coast of Hawaii, killing 12 Marines.
administration.
These 
Image: Report suggests al Qaeda militants are being awarded US contracts
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