Summary
Bishop Garrison, a former Pentagon official who led a 2021 investigation into military extremism, warns that recent New Year’s Day attacks by military personnel highlight the ongoing threat of radicalization and distress in the armed forces.
Despite a report recommending counter-extremism measures, its policies were never implemented, facing backlash from right-wing figures, including Trump’s defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth.
As Hegseth aims to dismantle counter-extremism programs, Garrison stresses the risks of neglecting the issue, citing cultural and mental health challenges within the military.
Extremism is born from the real sleeping danger of poor education and information standards which allow people to latch onto and be swayed by simplistic nonsense touted all too loudly on social media. When the rest of the world wore masks to protect the person next to them a loud section of the US population believed it was a plot to turn them Muslim. Similarly when the world understood the value of the developed vaccines a large part of the US thought it was a plot to implant tracking microchips - while carrying phones that were actually capable of tracking their activity. Every country has factions of this sort and the American population might have more reason than most to suspect government instructed mass vaccination programs but for a country with so much wealth the USA seems particularly prone to the sort of demagoguery that can take root in a poorly informed population. To put it more succinctly every day the film Idiocracy gets a little less funny.
It wasn’t even just while carrying the phone, they were literally posting the nonsense from the device that actually did the thing they were worried about. They had to be looking at an actual tracking device in order to accuse the creators of the vaccine of secretly trying to do what the phone companies already got them to do willingly, and spend money on.
As difficult as it is to imagine a reality where a post as scathing as yours was actually giving them to much credit, and that reality is the exact one we unfortunately have to live in.
The war on education and intellectualism is over. We lost.
It hasn’t been funny for years, probably more than a decade at this point for anyone paying enough attention.
The premise of being outpopulated wasn’t necessary: all we had to do was decide to become a country based around “reality” TV - completing the shift that really kicked off when we elected Reagan, screen actor, to massively restructure our tax system and eliminate our mental health institutions rather than reform them.