New Year’s Day attacks by US service members highlight threat, says Bishop Garrison who led DoD investigation

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.

  • SoftTeeth@lemmy.world
    306·
    21 hours ago

    The only bad extremism is right wing authoritarianism.

    Left wing extremism = the civil rights movement

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
      233·
      20 hours ago

      I would love the two magas who downvoted me to have the courage to share the opinions they always say they aren’t allowed to share.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        171·
        20 hours ago

        LOL, downvoted again but still no reply. MAGAs are fucking cowards.

    • chingadera@lemmy.world
      41·
      22 hours ago

      Lmao I wasn’t sure if I saw that other comment until I saw “Pepperidge Farm Remembers”

  • Chainweasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    45·
    1 day ago

    Every service member I personally know is pretty open about it, it doesn’t seem very asleep to me

    • horse_battery_staple@lemmy.world
      104·
      21 hours ago

      I was attached to MARSOC early on when they were forming the groups and recruiting from Raiders and Force Recon. I was usually attached when they needed to plus up for DMRs. Being 0317 gave me a lot of job opportunities in the early GWOT.

      Anyways, we would often deploy in joint efforts with the Green Beret ODAs and almost always it was the tertiary POGs that were the most gung ho assholes. They’d always let you know how smart they were and how stupid the government was for letting all the fat purple hairs into the general ranks. This guy was the POGest of POGs as he was a glorified drone operator. I have doubts he ever left the FOB.

      SOF/SF tier one units are filled with embezzling wife beaters who deal fent. I’ve rubbed shoulders with plenty of them. Plenty of them who rotate back to civ div end up robbing banks and selling their training services to militias. It’s the perfect setup for domestic terrorism.

      Excerpt from another thread on the Tesla Truck bomber

      • BrundleFly2077@sh.itjust.works
        143·
        11 hours ago

        I mean. Okay. But you wrote that knowing that very few people reading it would know what MARSOC, DMRs, “being 0317”, GWOT, ODAs, POGs (let alone the POGest of POGs), FOBs, SOF/F mean. And, plot twist, it was all an excerpt?

        What are you on about, man?

          • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
            21·
            1 hour ago

            You’re out of your mind if you think anyone reading this cares enough to find, copy, and paste each term to decipher them. Or that it’s easier than writing out each term in a non-military community.

              • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
                21·
                42 minutes ago

                Uh… Non-existent?

                I was attached to ZARGFLAX early on when they were forming the groups and recruiting from Raiders and Force Recon. I was usually attached when they needed to dork light for BXBs. Being 8675 gave me a lot of job opportunities in the early PLUKB.

                And that’s only your first 5!

                • horse_battery_staple@lemmy.world
                  11·
                  29 minutes ago

                  Sure, So I was attached to a military unit that worked with other military units. I would float between different units.

                  See how no understanding of these acronyms is necessary for the above statement? This is what we call context clues.

  • MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world
    26·
    1 day ago

    They have been saying this for decades now. The GWB era FBI was complaining about this in regards to future domestic terrorism.

  • seven_phone@lemmy.world
    32·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 hour ago

      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.

    • oyo@lemm.ee
      5·
      2 hours ago

      The war on education and intellectualism is over. We lost.

    • andyburke@fedia.io
      9·
      1 day ago

      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.