The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1363: 'The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012' w/ Dr. John Fieldhouse

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

78 MinutesPG-13John Fieldhouse joins Pete once more to read and comment on Charles J. Dunlop's 1992 Army War College paper, "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012."The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on Twitter Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. John Fieldhouse returns. How are you doing, Dr. Fieldhouse? Doing well. How you do, bro? Doing good, man. All right, you sent me this, and I was like,

like, it took me a couple days to read it, but as soon as I read it, I was like, oh, yeah, we should definitely go over this. I'd say you give an introduction as to what it is and, you know, what, I mean, just a very rough overview of why you think it was important to read. Yeah, I see this is sort of like an extension on when we did Lud Falk, his book on how to do Akuta Ta. And obviously, it goes without saying I'm not in favor of Akuta Ta. But if we're serious about the exercise of power, we need a look on how power is in practice of exercise, but also the theoretical framework that both us and the ruling class as a whole uses.

And it's titled The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012. Now it goes with, or it is an obvious year, but this book, this essay was originally published in 1992. It was published by Charles J. Dunlap Jr. He is a retired major general. At the time, he wrote this. I think he was a major lieutenant colonel of the United States Air Force. And he was attending Command and Journal Staff College with the United States Army. This was published as an essay in parameters, which is the journal for the United States Army War College. Frequently people go from one service to the other for the war college. But this is an essay that grew out of, again, a master's level course on military leadership and all the things that go with that at the time. Just real quick, as people ask, is how would somebody get away with writing something like this? And it's just like a couple of years ago, there was a war college paper on the need to actually improve conditions for recruiting whites from red states into the United States Army. And the very short answer is, number one, these are students, number two. your actual in-state as a student is to get through the program.

So a lot of times you will write papers where you're applying the theory to something that you actually care about. So you can sometimes get somewhat spicy topics. And very often these journals will publish a lot of those if they're within the criteria as a paper. So real quick, Charles Jr. J. Dunlop, he went on to be a general, two-star general, and the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General's Corps. He was the number two or number three JAG officer in the Air Force. But again, he was only a lieutenant colonel at the time. So again, this is a guy who is very senior in the United States military

as far as setting priorities for how military law is exercised, what it should mean as far as commanders. This was also something that was originally written. Again, 92 during the, excuse me, right. before the Clinton presidency. So at the end of the Bush won presidency, going into the Clinton presidency during the presidential campaign. So that gives us an idea of the time frame of the stuff he's writing about. Again, this is right before things like Waco and, you know, a bunch of things that we see as abuses happen towards Red State Americans. So those are all things I would tell, the reader,

the listener to bear in mind when we're going through this, sir. All righty. Let me read this. It looks like a, almost like a preamble by the author here. It says, and interrupt anytime, please. The letter that follows takes us on a darkly imagined excursion into the future. A military coup has taken place in the United States. The year is 2012. In General Thomas E.T. Brutus, commander-in-chief of the United Armed Forces of the United States now occupies the White House as permanent military, Plenipotentiary. His position has been ratified by a national referendum, though scattered disorders still prevail and arrests for access sedition are underway. A senior retired officer of the unified armed forces, known here simply as prisoner 22205-759, is one of those arrested having been

convicted by court-martial for opposing the coup. Prior to his execution, he was able to smuggle out of prison a letter to an old war college class. last mate, discussing the origins of the American military coup of 2012. In it, he argues that the coup was the outgrowth of trends visible as far back as 1992. These trends were the massive diversion of military forces to civilian uses, the monolithic unification of the armed forces, and the insularity of the military community. His letter survives and is here presented verbatim. He goes without saying, I hope, that the coup scenario above is purely a literary device intended to dramatize my concern over certain contemporary developments affecting

the armed forces and is emphatically not a prediction. So I will start reading a letter. Dear old friend, it's hard to believe that 20 years of past since we graduated from the war college. Remember the great discussions, the trips, the parties, the people? Those were the days. I'm not having quite as much fun anymore. You've heard about the sedition trials. Yeah, I was one of those arrested, convicted of disloyal statements and using contemptuous language towards officials. Disloyal? No. Contemptuous? You bet. With General Brutus in charge, it's not hard to be contemptuous. I've got to hand it to Brutus. He's ingenious. After the president died, he somehow persuaded the vice president not to take the oath of office. Did we then have a president or not? A real constitutional

conundrum, the papers called it. Brutus created just enough ambiguity to convince himself that as the senior military officer he could and should declare himself commander-in-chief of the unified armed forces. Remember what he said? Quote, had to fill the power vacuum, end quote, and Brutus showed he really knew how to use power. He declared martial law, postponed the elections, got the vice president to retire, and even moved into the White House. Quote, more efficient to work from there, he said. Remember that? When Congress convened that last time and managed to pass the Referendum Act, I really got my hopes up, but when the referendum approved Brutus's takeover, I knew we were in serious trouble. I caused a ruckus, you know, trying to organize a protest.

Then the security forces picked me up. My quickie trial was a joke. The sentence? Well, let's just say you won't have to save any beer for me at next year's reunion. Since it doesn't look like I'll be seeing you again, I thought I'd write everything down and try to get it to you. I'm calling my paper the origins of the American military coup of 2012. I think it's important to get the truth recorded before they rewrite history. If we're ever going to get our freedom back, we've got to understand how we got into this mess. People need to understand that armed forces exist to support and defend government, not to be the government. Faced with intractable national problems on one hand and an energetic and capable military on the other,

it can be all too seductive to start viewing the military as a cost-effective solution. We made a terrible mistake when we allowed the armed forces to be diverted from the original purpose. Just for real quick context, again, this has taken place in 92, early 93 timeframe. Again, it's during the presidential election that ultimately Clinton won, probably won because of the intervention or the participation. of Ross Pro there, a third party candidate, which basically broke the right or divided the right, despite the fact that Bush had fairly high approval ratings for an incumbent president coming off a Desert Storm. At the same time, this is right after the end of the Berlin Wall, there was a massive drawdown of

the United States military. A couple divisions were disbanded. There were units that literally came back from Desert Storm. Within six months, the units were disbanded and large numbers of these people were just discharged people who thought they had promising careers in the military just because, again, we're shifting from the perpetual cold wear to something we assumed would be peace, but, you know, screw me, that didn't happen, right? So that's kind of the situation we're in. And for context, I ended up going to college at a military college shortly after this. And one of the things that was discussed at are in political science departments of military schools of higher education like the War College, but also military academies, military colleges, was just a sort of

comparative government, which happens in all polyside departments, but a real look at the mechanics of what military dictatorships look like in practice. And without diverting this into a giant discussion of that, one of the things that's brought up is, number one, cost effectiveness in the military is kind of a joke. The military, especially the United States military, were not, despite the fact we spend more per soldier than anybody else in the world. We couldn't do things like have boots that wouldn't destroy your knees. But also the fact that military government in some ways is setting yourself up for a big fall because, again, the military comes in and takes control of the civil government. Immediately you have to have the best and brightest in the military chain of

command doing things in civil government that just weren't happening for things like trash pickup or running public sanitation systems. And now that you're putting your breast and your brightest, throughout the military and things like trash pickup. They're not doing, you know, regular, consistent military training. So very often what happened is these forces lose their next war, which can lead to a collapse of the military government, which is sort of like a repeat problem in places like Egypt.

So again, these are all kind of like background inside baseball things, but these are the things you, a reader, especially somebody who's, you know, millennial or Gen Z might not just rock because they weren't in that time and place in America in 1992. All right. I found a box of my notes and clippings from our war college days, told my keepers I needed to write the confession they want. I needed them to write the confession they want.

It's amazing. Looking through those old papers made me realize that even back in 1992, we should have seen this coming. The seeds of this outrage were all there. We just didn't realize how they would grow. But isn't that always the way with things like this? Somebody once said that the true watersheds of human affairs are seldom spotted amid the tumults of headlines broadcast on the hour.

And we had a lot of headlines back in the 90s to distract us. The economy was in the dumps, crime was rising, schools were deteriorating, drugs was rampant, drug use was rampant, the environment was in trouble, and the political scandals were occurring almost daily. Still, there were some good news, the end of the Cold War, as well as America's recent victory over Iraq. You almost want to reach back through time and say, by a poor naive child.

You think it's politically divisive now. Wait till you see the future. All of this and more contributed to the situation which we find ourselves today, a military that controls government and one that, ironically, can't fight. It wasn't any single cause that led us to this point.

Instead, it was a combination of several different developments, the beginnings of which were evident in 1992. Here's what I think happened. Americans became exasperated with democracy. We were disillusioned with the apparent inability of elected government to solve the nation's dilemmas. We were looking for someone or something that could produce workable answers. The one institution of government in which the people retained faith was the military.

Void by the military's obvious competence in the First Gulf War, the public increasingly turned to it for solutions to the country's problems. Americans called for an acceleration of trends begun to the war. the 1980s, tasking the military with a variety of new, non-traditional missions and vastly escalating its commitment to formerly ancillary duties. Though not obvious at the time, the cumulative effect of these new responsibilities was to incorporate the military into the political process to an unprecedented degree. These additional assignments also had the perverse effect of diverting focus and resources from the military's central mission of combat training and war fighting. Finally, organizational, political, and societal changes served to alter the American military's

culture. Today's military is not the one we knew when we graduated from the war college. Let me explain how I came to these conclusions. In 1992, not very many people would have thought a military coup d'état could ever happen here. Sure, there were eccentric conspiracy theorists who saw the Pentagon's hand in the assassination of President Kennedy, President Nixon's downfall, and similar events. But even the most avid believers had to admit that no outright military takeover had ever occurred before now. Heeding Washington's admonitions in his farewell address about the danger of overgrown military establishments, Americans generally viewed their armed forces with a judicious mixture of respect and weariness. For over two centuries,

that vigilance was rewarded, and most Americans came to consider the very notion of a military coup preposterous. Historian Andrew Janos captured the conventional view of the latter half of the 20th century in this clipping, I say, quote, a coup d'etat in the United States would be too fantastic to contemplate, not only because few would actually entertain the idea, but also because the bulk of the people are strongly attached to the prevailing political system and would rise in defense of a political leader, even though they might not like him. The environment most hospitable to coup d'etaz is one in which political apathy prevails as the dominant style. However, when Janos wrote that back in 1964, 61.9% of the electorate voted. Since then, voter participation has

steadily declined. By 1988, only 50.1% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. Simple extrapolation of those numbers to last spring's referendum would have predicted almost exactly the turnout. It was precisely reversed from that of 1964. 64. 61.9% of the electorate did not vote. America's societal malaise was readily apparent in 1992. 78% of Americans believed the country was on the wrong track. One researcher declared the social indicators were at their lowest in 20 years and insisted something was coming loose in the social infrastructure. The nation was frustrated and angry about its problems. And again, this is written in 92, so have the times changed. America wanted solutions and democratically elected government wasn't providing them. The country suffered from a deep pessimism

about politicians and government after years of broken promises. David Finkel observed in the Washington Post magazine that for most Americans, the perception of government is that it has evolved from something that provides democracy's framework into something that provides obstacles, from something to celebrate into something to ignore. Likewise, politicians in their proposals seemed stale and repetitive. Millions of voters gave up hope of finding answers. The environment of apathy, Genos characterized as a precursor to a coup had arrived. Unlike the rest of government, the military enjoyed a remarkably steady climb and popularity throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. And it's a very 1990s. And it Indeed, it had earned the admiration of the public.

Dabilitated by the Vietnam War, the U.S. military said about reinventing itself. As early as 1988, U.S. News and World Report heralded the result. Quote, in contrast to the dispirited, drug ravaged, do-your-on-thing, armed services of the 70s and early 80s, the U.S. military has been transformed into a fighting force of gung-ho, attitude, spit-shine, discipline, and ten-hut morale, end quote. after the U.S. military dealt Iraq a crushing defeat in the First World Gulf War, the, I hate this word, I can never pronounce it, ignominy of Vietnam evaporated. Yeah, and again, this is again, something that sometimes is not very often to people today,

is how bad the experience of Vietnam was to the Army. And then the transformation into an all-volunteer force, which we hadn't had since. I don't know. World War I, pre-World War I, because in between, we even had a draft in between World War I and World War II. So the idea that we were going to completely do away with conscription to the point that when Carter and the Congress imposed the Selective Service Act, requiring every man 18 to go and register for the draft, they were really worried about the time. They thought it was weird. And the fact that we just no longer had the draft, but just the army coming away. from the military as a whole, a giant humiliation, and then transferring himself into a professional

force was a very big success story that people outside the U.S. military don't always see. When we graduated from the War College in 1992, the armed forces were the smartest, best educated, and best disciplined force in history. While polls showed that the public invariably gave Congress low remarks, a February 1991 survey, that, quote, public confidence in the military soared to 85% far surpassing every other institution in our society, end quote. The armed forces had become America's most and perhaps only trusted arm of government. And that to me is something we need to always remember people on our side. Yes, and I say this is a veteran, the U.S. military, we have faith in it for a reason,

but we don't need to be blind in our faith, and we can't allow it to allow ourselves to have the wool pulled over the eyes as it were. And I think part of the issue we're seeing with Iran is people very much on our side, too many just blat or automatically trusts the U.S. military, even when it's a politician saying stupid shit about a place who we have no business in fighting. And we're seeing that today, I think. Assumptions about the role of the military in society also began to change. 20 years before we graduated, the Supreme Court confidently declared in Laird v. Tatum, that Americans had a traditional and strong resistance to any military intrusion into civilian affairs.

But Americans were now rethinking the desirability and necessity of that resistance. They compared the military's principal competence with the chicanery and ineptitude of many elected officials and found the latter wanting. Commentator James Faloz expressed the new thinking in an August 1991 article in the Atlantic magazine. musings on the contributions of the military to American society, fellows wrote, quote, I am beginning to think that the only way the national government can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military. He elaborated on his reasoning.

According to our economic and political theories, most agencies of the government have no special standing to speak about the general national welfare. Each represents a certain constituency. The interest groups fight it out. The military, strangely, is the one government institution that has been assigned legitimacy to act on its notion of the collective good. National defense can make us do things. Train engineers build highways. That long-term good of the nation or common sense cannot.

About a decade before Fallow's article appeared, Congress initiated the use of national defense as a rationale to boost military participation in an activity. historically the exclusive domain of civilian government. Law enforcement. Congress concluded that the rising tide of drugs being smuggled into the United States presented a grave threat to all Americans. Finding the performance of civilian law enforcement agencies and counteracting that threat unsatisfactory, Congress passed a military cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agency's Act of 1981.

In doing so, Congress specifically intended to force reluctant military commanders to actively collaborate in police work. This was a historic change of policy. Since the passage of the Possecomitatis Act in 1878, the military had distanced itself from law enforcement activities. While the 1987 law did retain certain limits on the legal authority of military personnel, its net effect was to dramatically expand

military participation in anti-drug efforts. By 1991, the Department of Defense was spending $1.2 billion on counterfeit, or narcotics crusades. Air Force Civilian Air Force Surveillance Aircraft were sent to track airborne smugglers. Navy ships patrol the Caribbean looking for drug-laden vessels, and National Guardsmen were searching for marijuana cachets near the borders. By 1992, combating drug trafficking was formally declared a high national security mission. It wasn't too long before 21st century legislators were calling for more military involvement in police work. Crime seemed out of control. Most disturbing,

the incidents of violent crime continued to climb. Americans were horrified and desperate. A third even believed vigilanceism could be justified. Rising lawlessness was seen as, but another example of the civilian political leadership's inability to fulfill government's most basic duty to ensure public safety. People once again wanted the military to help. And again, the context of this happened He's writing this shortly after the LA riots, in which we did have military troops on the streets Once they were mobilized and when they retried the civil rights violations the officers involved in the Rodney King beating the Marine Corps had personnel on standby to go in their units that Historically you can't justify in a civil policing situation. So we were in a time where yeah, the 90s were the time of abundance and relative peace, but you know, civil situations had gotten to the point where Americans were willing to tolerate the military doing domestic policing in very limited cases because things were getting out of hand.

And again, we've reached the point where the National Guard is on the street in certain specific cities. And I actually support that effort. But again, what goes around comes around. Wasn't the 101st deployed to Los Angeles? I don't know. I know the seventh idea. California did. I know the Marines did.

I've got a buddy who's a supply sergeant in Ford Award who was there who actually was issued live ammo. So yeah, there were some regular army troops on the ground. I thought Darrell mentioned that in one of his series. Yeah, I don't know if it was 1001st, because there used to be a light infantry division out in California. But I do know that 1001st got deployed for other things like during some of the forced integration in Little Rock. and places like when they were integrating University of Alabama, 100 firsts, were there. I actually know someone here who was there in the integration in Alabama here. Interesting.

Hints of an expanded police function were starting to surface while we were still at the war college. For example, District of Columbia National Guardsmen established a regular military presence in high crime areas. Eventually, people became acclimated to seeing uniform military personnel patrolling their neighborhood. Now troops are an adjunct to almost all police forces in the country. In many of the areas where much of our burgeoning population of elderly Americans live, Brutus calls them national security zones, the military is often the only law enforcement agency. Consequently, the military was ideally positioned in thousands of communities to support the coup. Again, this is supposed to be in his fantasy imagined future, but I get noticed in real-world time that District Columbia was the first place to actually do this.

Concerned about crime was a major reason why General Brutus's actions were approved in the referendum. Although voter participation by the general public was low, older Americans voted at a much higher rate. Furthermore, with the aging of the baby boomer generation, the block of American voters over 45 grew to almost 53% of voters by 2010. This wealthy, older electorate welcomed an organization which could ensure their physical security. When it counted, they backed Brutus in the referendum, probably the last votes they'll ever cast. The irony is the aging baby booners mostly voted for their own security and ignoring the rest of the populace. The military's constituency was larger than just the aged. More poor Americans of all ages became dependent upon the military.

military not only for protection against crime, but also for medical aid. Medical care. Again, we saw the roots of this back in 1992. First, it was a barely defeated proposal to use veterans hospitals to provide care for the non-veteran poor. Next were calls to deploy military medical assets to relieve hard-pressed urban hospitals. As a number of uninsured and underinsured grew, the pressure to provide care became inexorable. Now, military hospitals serve millions of new, non-military patients. Similarly, a proposal to use so-called underutilized military bases as drug rehabilitation centers was implemented on a massive scale. Yeah, one of the things for sake of context is military personnel, their family, well, at least their families now get tricare, which is a medical

insurance, which is provided for the U.S. military. That's something that came in in the Clinton years. Back in the old system, dependence of military personnel just went to military hospitals. And as a kid, especially living in Germany, you know, like everything I went to, I went through a military hospital. So in some ways prior to the drawdown during the Clinton years, military medicine was sort of, you know, outbuilded. It was sort of larger than what it was needed to support because it was engaged with a civilian populace. And that's something that didn't happen in our life. We didn't expand to serving the poor because, again, there was a massive reduction in military medicine to the point that they even had to happen. outsource some of the care of active duty service members to contracted agencies.

Yeah, very well aware of that I was born in a military hospital in Germany and they didn't know that my mother had epilepsy until I was born. It presented itself in childbirth and they took care of her epilepsy and treated it in a military hospital. So yeah, yeah, and same. You know, it's weird one of those kind of things I tried to explain to people growing up in a military family back of the day. I found that I had an ADHD diagnosis from military doctors in the 80s, and you'd say, okay, so you got put into special programs? The answer was no, because the Army wouldn't give drugs out to kids. So I was told, they told my parents to go get me involved in sports and scouting when you get older, send them to a military school. So not to sound like

the aging old guy, but, you know, in a lot of ways, ADHD didn't quite turn into a medical, you know, specialty case until well after I had aged out of that cohort. Even the youngest citizens were co-opted. During the 1990s, the public became aware that military officers had the math and science backgrounds desperately needed to revitalize U.S. education. In fact, programs involving military personnel were already underway while we were at the war college. We now have an entire generation of young people who have grown up comfortable with the site

of military personnel patrolling the streets and teaching in their classrooms? There were a lot of programs starting about this time to get retiring soldiers and officers to get them to do teaching. First off was the expansion of junior ROTC because there's like six times as many programs as there was before the Clinton administration. Yeah, Colin Powell spearheaded that. But there are all kinds of other programs to get veterans, retirees, to actually get them to go into teaching. So they weren't wearing uniforms, but again, there was a big influx of guys from military backgrounds going into education at this time. As you know, it wasn't just crisis in public safety, medical care, and education that the

military was tasked to mend. The military was also called upon to manage to clean up by the nation's environmental hazards. By 1992, the armed services were deeply involved in this arena, and that involvement mushroomed. Once the military done, demonstrated its expertise. It wasn't long before environmental problems were declared national security threats and full responsibility devolved to the armed forces. Yeah, and this is also something that didn't quite happen, but again, we still see the Corps of Engineers every time there's major floods and things like that. And you'd ask, why is this a military function? And the short answer is this is something that's been that way since the early years of the Republic, partly because West Point, being one of the few higher education, or was the only engineering school in the United States at the time. So the Army had the only professionally trained engineers in the United States. And for whatever reason, that legacy system persists to this day.

Other problems were transformed into national security issues. As more commercial airliners went bankrupt, airlines went bankrupt and unprofitable air routes dropped, the military was called upon to provide essential air transport to the affected regions. In the name of national defense, the military next found itself in the sea lift business. Ships purchased by the military for contingencies released, complete with military crews at low rates to U.S. exporters to help solve the trade deficit. The nation's crumbling infrastructure was also declared a national security threat. As was proposed back in 1991, troops rehabilitated public housing, rebuilt bridges and roads, and constructed new government buildings. By late 1992, voices in both Congress and the military had been.

begun a crescendo calling for military involvement across a broad spectrum of here-to-fore purely civilian activities. Soon it became common in practically every community to see crews as soldiers working on local projects. Military attired drew no stairs. This is also something that didn't happen in the real world. And again, while the Corps of Engineers persist in having lots of national assets they're in control of, that means you have a military officer in command with civil servants who work for the army doing things. The Army in particular, right, has phased out a large amount of their actual construction personnel from the engineers.

So we have combat engineers. We still have some construction capacity, but the Navy, their CBs actually do a lot more construction stuff than we do. So this is something that hypothetically could have happened in his future that just didn't happen. And one of the comments I was in a make was when they talk about sea lift. Seelifts become a big issue, you know, with our growing adventure in Iran because we're learning, among other things, the United States has a declining merchant marine, declining commercial fleet. And that's one of the things we talked about with Firas, which has become an issue to the point that the entirety of United States shipping ship manufacturing can only produce on average less than one ship a year in the United States.

And now that we've shut off Russian shipping for one, which is a surprising amount of the global shipping trade, trapped a bunch of stuff in the strait of Hormuz. God knows how many ships are stuck there. So some of these, their crews are actually left. So you have empty ships there, there. And at the same time, the United States has almost no ability to construct new ships. So we're sort of in the stage right now where suddenly this is becoming an emergency. something that for 30-something years we all thought was, you know, don't talk about that.

That's all in the past. The revised charter for the armed forces was not confined to domestic enterprises. Overseas Humanitarian and Nation Building assignments proliferated. Though these projects have always been performed by the military on an ad hoc basis in 1986, Congress formalized that process. It declared overseas humanitarian and civic assistance activities to be valid military missions, and specifically authorized them by law. Fueled by favorable press from operations in Iraq, Bangladesh, and the Philippines during the early 1990s,

humanitarian missions were touted as a military's model for the future. That prediction came true. When several African governments collapsed under AIDS epidemics and famines around the turn of the century, U.S. troops first introduced to the continent in the 1990s were called upon to restore basic services. They never left. Now the U.S. military constitutes the de facto government in many of those areas. Once again, the first whisperings of such duties could be heard in 1992. Again, something that didn't happen on our timeline, but in many ways we got around those problems

by just allowing those people to migrate to Europe and the United States. Sure, but when you look at this, when you look at what he's laying out here, did a lot of this not happen, not for the reasons of like AIDS or anything like that, but I mean, you basically have this fight over African countries between Russia, China, and the United States. Yeah, and we've had special operations person that we now die in combat and sub-sadair and Africa.

So we didn't quite do the civil administration part of it. But yeah, we have... By the year 2000, the armed forces penetrated many, but... Going on. I'm sorry, you had dropped. out for a second, I spoke over you. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry.

Yeah, I was saying, yeah, we didn't have the ongoing administration there. But yeah, we have had this, you know, ongoing proxy war that sometimes turns hot involving the United States. So, yeah, the war part of it has definitely happened. By the year 2000, the armed forces had penetrated many vital aspects of American society. More and more military officers sought the kind of autonomy in these civilian affairs that they would expect from their military superiors and the execution. of traditional combat operations.

Thus began the inevitable politicization of the military. With so much responsibility for virtually everything government was expected to do, the military increasingly demanded a larger role in policymaking. But in democracy, policymaking is at best left to those accountable to the electorate. Nonetheless, well-intentioned military officers accustomed to the ordered hierarchical structure of military society became impatient with the delay. and inefficiencies inherent to the democratic process. Consequently, they increasingly sought to avoid it.

They convinced themselves that they could more productively serve the nation in carrying out their new assignments if they accrued to themselves under Confederate power to implement their programs. They forgot Lord Acton's warning that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Congress became their unwitting ally. Because of the popularity of the new military programs and the growing dependence upon them, Congress passed a Military Plenipotentiary Act of 2005. The legislation was the legacy of the Goldwater

Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Among many revisions, Goldwater Nichols strengthened the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and mandated numerous changes intended to increase jointness in the armed services. Supporters of the Military Plenipotentiary Act argued that unity of command was critical to the successful management of the numerous activities. now considered military operations. Moreover, many congressmen mistakenly believe that the Goldwater Nichols, that Goldwater Nichols was one of the main reasons for the military success in the first Gulf War. They viewed the Military Plenipotentiary Act as an enhancement of the strengths of Goldwater Nichols. In passing this legislation, Congress added greater authority to the

military's top leadership position. Loved by favorable experiences with Chairman like General Colin Powell, Congress saw little danger in converting the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff into the even more powerful into the even more powerful military plentipotentiary. No longer merely an advisor, the military plentipotentiary became a true commander of all U.S. services, purportedly because the status could better ameliorate the effects of perceived inter-service squabbling. Despite warnings found in the legislative history of Goldwater Nichols and elsewhere,

enormous power was concentrated in the hands of a single, unelected official. Unfortunately, Congress presumed that principled people would always occupy the office. No one expected a General Brutus would arise. This paragraph is definitely relevant, even if we don't agree with the author. Again, I understand some of the authority we have can eventually be used by people who don't care for us. The military planet Potentiary was not Congress's only structural change in military governance. By 2007, the services were combined to form the unified armed forces. Recalled that when we graduated from the War College, greater unification was being seriously

suggested as an economy measure. Eventually, that consideration and the conviction that jointness was an unqualified military virtue led to unification. But unification ended the creative tension between the services. Besides rejecting the operational logic of separate services, no one seemed to recognize the checks and balances function that service separatism provided a democracy obliged to maintain a large professional military establishment. The founding fathers knew the importance of checks and balances and controlling the agencies of government. Quote, ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

Experience has taught mankind that necessity of auxiliary controls, including supplying opposite and rival interests. Unified control of the military has always been an issue. Joint services is an issue in the U.S. military. The naval services, meaning Navy Marine Corps Coast Guard and the Public Health Service and NOAA, actually do a very good job coordinating. The Army doesn't do a particularly good job coordinating with anybody other than the Air Force kind of sort of, but not really. In places where we've had joint, you know, battle space commanders, we've had Army and Marine units working. we've worked it out, but it isn't as seamless as possible. And what they're talking about, a unified force is, like both Canada and Israel essentially

have one military force. Now, they have air forces and navies, but they're just portions of the larger military. And for decades, Canada tried to pretend that everybody was, you know, part of the same force and whether you want the land air and sea was just a function of your current assignment. So this is kind of like projection of what Canada. done onto us, but even Canada doesn't really do it that way anymore. Ambition is a natural trade of military organizations and their leaders. Whatever might have been the inefficiencies of separate military services, their very existence

served to counteract the unswored desires of any single service. The roles in missions, the roles and missions debates and other arguments, once seen as petty military infighting, also provide an invaluable forum for competitive. competitive analysis of military doctrine. Additionally, they served to ensure that unscrupulous designs by a segment of the military establishment were ruthlessly exposed. Once the services were unified, the impetus to do so vanished, and the authority of the military in relation to the other institutions of government rose. Descended by its pervasive new duties, monolithic militarism came to dominate the Darwinian political environment of 21st century America.

Why did uniform leadership of our day acquiesced to the transformation of the military? Much of the answer can be traced to the budget showdowns of the early 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the U.S. military without an easily articulated rationale for large defense budgets. Billions and cuts were sought. Journalist Bruce Oster put it bluntly, quote, winning a share of the budget wars requires that the military find new missions for a post-Cold War world that is devoid of clear military threats, end quote. Capitulating, military leaders embraced formally disdained assignments.

As one comments are cynically observed, quote, the services are eager to talk up non-traditional budget justifying roles, end quote. The Vietnam era a pharism, it's a lousy war, but it's the only one we got, was resuscitated. Still, that doesn't completely explain why in 2012 the military, leadership would succumb to a coup. To answer that question, fully requires examination of what was happening to the officer corps as the military drew down in the 1980s and 1990s. Ever since large peacetime military establishments became permanent features after World War II, the great leveler of the officer corps was the constant influx of officers from the Reserve Officer Training

Corps program. The product of diverse colleges and universities throughout the United States, these officers were a vital source of liberalism in the military services. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, that was changing. Force reductions decreased a number of ROTC eight graduates. The service is accepted. Although General Powell called ROTC vital to democracy, 62 ROTC programs were closed in 1991 and another 350 were considered for closure. The numbers of officers produced by the services,

academies also fell, but at a significantly slower pace. Consequently, the proportion of Academy graduates in the officer corps climbed. Academy graduates, along the graduates of such military schools as the Citadel, Virginia Military Institute, and Norwich University tended to feel a greater homogeneity of outlook than, say, the pool of ROTC graduates at large, with a result that as the proportion of such graduates grew, diversity of outlook overall diminished to some degree. I feel seen and appreciated. Moreover, the ROTC officers that did remain increasingly came from a narrower range of schools. Focusing on the military's policy to exclude homosexuals from service, advocates of political correctness

succeeded in driving ROTC from the campuses of some of our best universities. In many instances, they also prevailed in barring military recruiters from campus. Little thought was given to the long-term consequences of limiting the pool from which our military leadership was drawn. The result was a much more uniformly oriented military elite whose outlook was progressively conservative. Yeah, and this gets back to something that Daryl has talked about. In the last few generations, the military has increasingly become a caste in the U.S. military, or in the United States, where for the most part, the biggest predictor of who is willing to join the military is who has a family member in already. And very much, that's why it's much more Southern than it used to be.

It's much more Latino than it used to be. It's much more Intermountain West and Mormon than it used to be. And those are, again, you know, essentially when you have a professional managerial class at war with people like you and me that at the same time, we provide a larger portion of the military, the professional manager O'Callas every once in a while gets concerned about that. Furthermore, well-meaning attempts at improving service life led to the unintended insularity of military society, representing a return to the cloistered life of the pre-World War II armed forces. Military bases complete with schools, churches, stores, childcare centers, and recreational

areas became never to be left, never to be left islands of tranquility removed from the chaotic crime-bridden environment outside the gates. As one reporter put it in 1991, quote, increasingly isolated from mainstream America, today's troops tend to view the civilian world with suspicion and sometimes hostility, end quote. Thus, a physically isolated, intellectually alienated officer corps was paired with an enlisted force, likewise distance from the society it was supposed to serve. In short, the military evolved into a force susceptible to manipulation by an authoritarian leader from its own select ranks. In that case, I may not agree with this conclusion.

But some of those things really do need to be understood. Like you said, you know, when we grew up in Germany as dependents, even if we were off post at that time. But we went to military hospitals for care. We went to schools that were run by the Department of Defense. You know, at one time, DOD schools were considered the parents. top school compared to any, you know, state school system in the United States. So there are lots of kids my age, you know, literally all of their schooling was done through DOD schools until they went to university. And back in the day, it was just a different world. And it didn't quite happen

the way he described it. But that was something that some people thought could happen as we, you know, transitioned to a smaller, all-voluntary force, which didn't quite happen the way he said. What made this all the more disheartening was the wretched performance of our forces in the second Gulf War. Consumed with ancillary and non-traditional missions, the military neglected its fundamental raison d'etra. As the Supreme Court succinctly put it more than half a century ago, the primary business of armies and navies is to fight or be ready to fight wars should the occasion arise. When Iranian army started pouring into the lower Gulf states in 2010, the U.S. armed forces were ready to do anything but fight.

That speaks for itself. Yeah, I mean, you just replace Iranian with them. Preoccupation with humanitarian duties, narcotics, interdiction, and all the rest of the peripheral missions left the military unfit to engage an authentic military opponent. Performing the new mission, sapped resources from what most experts agree, was one of the vital ingredients to victory in the first Gulf War. Training. Training is, quite literally, a zero-sum game. One moment spent performing a non-traditional mission is one

unavailable for orthodox military exercises. We should have recognized a grave risk. In 1991, the Washington Post reported that in interview after interview across the services, senior leaders and non-commissioned officers stressed that they cannot be ready to fight without, frequent rehearsal of perishable skills. And this gets back to the issue with military governments in particular. Very often happens as military coups are somewhat popular because it's the most competent part of the state in that society. But unfortunately, taking out the trash and managing, you know, toilet systems, plumbing systems

for a community that is not the same thing as training troops to fight and kill the enemy. The military's anti-drug activities were a big part of the problem. Oh, sure, I remember the facile claims of exponents of the military's counter-narcotics involvement as to what valuable training it provided. Did anyone really think that crew members of an AWACS, an aircraft designed to track high-performance military aircraft in combat, significantly improved their skills by hours of tracking slow-moving light planes? Did they seriously imagine that troops enhanced combat skills, by looking for marijuana under car seats?

Did they truly believe the crews of the Navy's sophisticated anti-war and anti-submarine ships received meaningful training by following lumbering trawlers around the Caribbean? Tragically, they did. The problem was exacerbated when political pressures exempted the guard and the reserves from the harshest effects of the budgetary cutbacks of the early 1990s. The first Gulf War demonstrated that modern weapons and tactics were simply too complex for parts soldiers to master during their allotted drill periods, however well motivated. Still, Creative Guard and Reserve defenders contrived numerous civic actions and humanitarian assignments and

sold them as training. Left unexplained was how such training was supposed to fit with the military strategies that contemplated short, violent, come-as-you-are-expeditionary wars. Nice to have Guard and Reserve support-oriented programs prevail that the the expense of critical active duty combat capabilities. Yeah, and for the sake of the reader, again, Guard and reserves were less than amazing during the first Gulf War. There was one National Guard maneuver brigade famously didn't graduate from the training center until the day that the war ended, which is sort of saying, you guys can go home now.

Nobody's using you. Between the first Gulf War and the 2003 invasion, significant changes happened to the National Guard and Reserves to ensure that they were training properly for their wartime missions. And after being in Iraq for a couple of years, Guard and Reserve units got very good at making sure the time they had was properly spent training because when people start dying, suddenly you start caring about doing your job. So this didn't happen the way they described, but partly just because, as he said, the issues with getting part-timers to the same kind of competitive edge as full-timers, well, they made that happen by focusing a lot in training and mobilizing

them repeatedly. But this is an example of what could happen, and I haven't been following the Guard and Reserves too much in the last decade since we've drawn down from Iraq and then Afghanistan, so I think they're at risk of some of these same issues happening. Perhaps even more damaging than the diversion of resources was the assault on the very ethos of military service. Rather than bearing in mind the Supreme Court's admonition to focus on warfighting, the military was told to alter its purpose. Former Secretary of State James Baker typified the trendy new tone in remarks about the military's airlift of food and medicine to the former Soviet republics

in early 1992. He said the airlift would vividly show the people of the former Soviet Union that those that once prepared for war with them now have the courage and conviction to use their militaries to say, we will wage a new peace. In truth, militaries ought to prepare for war and leave the peace waging to those agencies of government whose mission is just that. Nevertheless, such pronouncements, seconded by military leaders, become the fashionable philosophy. The result, people in the military no longer consider themselves warriors. Instead, they perceive themselves as policemen, relief workers, educators, builders, healthcare providers, politicians, everything but warfighters. When these philanthropists met the Iranian 10th armored corps near Dharan during the

Second Gulf War, they were brutally slaughtered by a military that had not forgotten what militaries were supposed to do or what war is really all about. The devastation of the military's martial spirit was exemplified by its involvement in police activities. Inexplicably, we ignored the deleterious effect on combat motivations suffered by the IDF as a result of their efforts to police. least the West Bank in Gaza. Few seem to appreciate the fundamental difference between the police profession and the professional arms. As Richard J. Barnett observed the New Yorker, quote, the line between police action and

the military operation is real. Police derive their power from their acceptance as officers of the law. Legitimate authority, not firepower, is the essential element. Yeah, and that's always important, right? Law enforcement is basically always a paramilitary function at a minimum. Some places it's a fully military function, but we cannot mistake for a second that getting soldiers to do civil policing is the same thing as maintaining the edge for war with an actual opponent. Police organizations are understandably oriented toward the studied restraint necessary for the end sought, a judicial conviction. As one drug enforcement administration agent noted, quote, the military can kill people better

than we can, but when we go to a jungle lab, we're not there to move onto the target by fire and maneuver to destroy the enemy. We're there to arrest suspects and seize evidence, end quote. If military forces are inculcated with the same spirit of restraint, combat performance is threatened. Moreover, law enforcement is also not just a form of low-intensity conflict. In low-intensity conflict, the military aim is to win the will of the people, a virtually impossible task with criminals motivated by money, not ideology. Which is one of the issues we had in Iraq post-invasion, when we switch from, you know, the initial invasion to actually do instability slash support operation slash counterinsurgency.

Some of the units we brought in were guys who had done peacekeeping operations, either in the Sinai between Israel and Egypt or, you know, in the Balkans. And it became very clear to commanders in those areas that, yeah, it's not quite the same thing. And I think in learning that, some people died who didn't have to. Humanitarian missions likewise undermine the military's sense of itself. As one Navy officer gushed during the 1991 Bangladesh relief operation,

it's great to be here doing the opposite of a soldier. While no true soldier relishes war, the fact remains that the essence of the military is warfighting. in preparation for the same. What journalist Barton Gilman has said of the army can be extrapolated to the military as a whole. It is an organization whose fighting spirit depends heavily on tradition. If that tradition becomes imbued with a preference for doing the opposite of a soldier, fighting spirit is bound to suffer. When we first heard editorial calls to pacify the military by involving it in civic projects, we should have given them the forceful rebuke they deserved.

When they say that, it depends upon tradition. I mean, you can come back to things like, why did they make those units remove Confederate battle streamers from their flags and the attacks on tradition of the recent pass are also part of that desire to weaken the military? Military analyst Harry Summers warned back in 91 that when militaries lose sight of their purpose catastrophe results. Citing a study of,

of pre-World War II Canadian military police as it related to the subsequent battlefield disasters, he observed that, quote. Instead of using the peacetime interregnum to hone their military skills, senior Canadian military officers sought out civilian missions to justify their existence. When war came, they were woefully unprepared.

Instead of protecting their soldiers' lives, they led them to their deaths. In today's post-Cold War peacetime environment, this trap again looms large. Some today within the U.S. military are also searching for relevance with draft doctrinal manuals giving touchy-feely pre-war and post-war civilian operations equal weight with war fighting. This is an insidious mistake, end quote. And this is very true.

We must remember that America's position at the end of the Cold War had no historical precedent. For the first time, the nation, in peacetime, found itself with a still-sizeable, professional military establishment that was not preoccupied with an overarching external threat. Yet the uncertainties in the aftermath of the Cold War limited the extent to which those forces could be safely downsized. When the military was then obliged to engage in a bewildering array of non-traditional duties to further justify its existence, it is little wonder that its traditional apolitical professionalism eventually eroded. Clearly, the curious tapestry of military authoritarianism and combat and effectiveness that we see today was not yet woven in,

it was not yet woven in 1992, but the threads were there. Knowing what I know now, here's the advice I would have given the war college class in 1992 had I been their graduation speaker. Point one. Demand that the armed forces focus exclusively on indisputably military duties. We must not diffuse our energies away from our fundamental responsibility for warfighting, To send ill-trained troops into combat makes us accomplices to murder. Point two. Acknowledge that national security does have economic, social, educational, and environmental dimensions, but insists that this doesn't necessarily mean the problems of those areas of the

responsibility the military to correct. Stylishly designating efforts to solve national ills as wars doesn't convert them into something appropriate for the employment of military forces. Point three. Readily seed budgetary resources to those agencies whose business it is to address the non-military issues the armed forces are presently asked to fix. We are not the DEA, EPA, Peace Corps, Department of Education, or Red Cross, nor should we be. It has never been easy to give up resources, but in the long-term we and the nation, will be better served by a smaller but appropriately focused military. Point four. Divested defense budget and perception skewing, divest the defense budget of perception skewing expenses. Narcotics, interdiction, environmental cleanup, humanitarian relief, and other cost tangential to actual combat capabilities should be assigned to the budgets of DEA, EPA, state, and so forth.

As long as these expensive programs are hidden in the defense budget, taxpayer understandably, but mistakenly, will continue to believe he's buying military readiness. On that note, keep in mind, a large part of the intelligence budget of the United States is hidden in the defense budget, and that has definitely had effects. Next point. Continue to press for the elimination of superfluous resource-draining Guard and Reserve units. Increase the training tempo responsibilities and compensation of those that remain. The U.S. military has done a good job of disbanding and reassigning or reflagging, repurposing units for that reason. Next point. Educate the public to the sophisticated training requirements occasioned by the complexities of modern warfare.

It's imperative we rid the public of the misperception that soldiers in peacetime are essentially unemployed and therefore free to assume new missions. Next point. Resist unification of the state. services not only on operational grounds, but also because unification would be inimical to the checks and balances that underpin democratic government. Slow the pace of fiscally driven consolidation so that the impact on less quantifiable aspects of military effectiveness can be scrutinized. Like I said, that never happened in the U.S. Canada has kind of disunified their forces. Israel is a weird example, and nobody in the world thinks we should be copying the IDF. this point. Next point. Assure that officer accessions from the service academies correspond with

overall force reductions, but maintain separate service academies, and keep ROTC on a wide diversity of campuses, if necessary, resort to litigation to maintain ROTC campus diversity. And one of the things that was done is on campuses that stopped ROTC is just removing all federal grants and funds there. And that has worked. in some cases to force compliance and liberal colleges. Yeah, is he arguing that the diversity of having leftists and nons in the military would be better? That's what he seems to be. I think so. Oh, all right.

Or yet recruiting resources and campaigns toward ensuring that all echelons of society are represented in the military without compromising standards, except that this kind of recruiting may increase, costs. It's worth it. Work to moderate the base as an island, work to moderate the base as an island syndrome by providing improved incentives for military members and families to assimilate into civilian communities. Within the information programs for our force of all volunteer professionals, increasingly U.S. based, strengthen the emphasis upon such themes as the inviolitable, of the Constitution. A sentence of of our civilian leadership over the military and citizens' responsibilities.

Yeah, a big thing that was done here is just shrinking the amount of housing on military installations as it wore out, only replacing so much of it, and then not allowing, in most cases, people to send, if they lived off post, to send their children to DoD schools is one of the things that's been done to get people to integrate in local communities. We can argue about whatever success that's happened, but keep it. mine increasingly the South in places like that have the bulk of military installations. So integrating in those communities was not quite an issue. Finally, I would tell our classmates that democracy is a fragile institution that must be continuously nurtured and scrupulously protected.

I would also tell them that they must speak out when they see the institution threatened. Indeed, it is their duty to do so. Richard Gabriel aptly observed in his book to serve with honor that quote. When one discusses dissent, loyalty, and the limits of military obligation, the central problem is that the military represents a threat to civil order, not because it will usurp authority, but because it does not speak out on critical policy decisions. The soldier fails to live up to his oath to serve the country if he does not speak out when he sees his civilian or military superiors executing policies he feels to be wrong. That's part of the whole big like people argue you're you're just there to kill people you're not supposed to have an opinion

yeah and we can discuss this but it's it's always sort of a long issue of what's considered permissible speech the very short answer is you should limit what you have in a public format this again written in 92 was before anybody had even conceived of social media so which changed the game for a lot of things, but it's generally understood. You have to be clear that anything you do in a public forum, you have to not represent yourself as a member of the military, even though everybody knows that. And you're still responsible for the consequences of anything

that would violate professional standards of the military if you save them in that environment. Gabriel was wrong when he dismissed the military's potential to threaten civil order, but he was right when he described our responsibilities. The catastrophe that occurred on our watch took place because we failed to speak out against policies we knew were wrong. It's too late for me to do any more, but it's not for you.

Best regards, prisoner 222305-759. Yeah, and again, to be clear, I don't agree with this in any sense. But again, like I said, we were doing a series talking about military coups. So this is a good adjunct. I'll have to send you a link, but there is a current sitting member of Congress who wrote a rebuttal to it not too long ago. And I give him credit for having the balls to say, you know what, a military coup does sound kind of cool, fam. But I'm not necessarily, I don't know that I agree with it because I haven't read the alternative. But again, this document's one of those things you sort of have to look at read when you discuss civil military relations and what a coup could even conceivably look like.

the United States and why it's basically inconceivable in an American environment. And again, a lot of it is interesting just looking at this perception of what could happen in the next 20 years from the respective in 92. And a lot of those things haven't happened, whereas some of the things he talks about, like, civil, you know, the devices misses civil society, you know, compared to the 90s and we both lived through it, I don't think anything was nearly as divisive as where we are right now and the amount of violence from one political faction to another is nothing. It was nothing like it is now.

So it's relevant to our current time and place is what I'm saying. I'm old enough to remember. I was telling somebody the other day that I was, I'm old enough to remember that when like members of Congress, the ones that were obviously your opposite, they didn't act like they were openly hostile to you. Exactly. What's upon a time being a non was actually possible in United States society.

It didn't mean you lived under Iraq. So you just grew up with that. And then you saw it. What's interesting is him writing this in 1992, I think, is the most important. One of the most important parts of this is because that's really the sea change. Yeah. Is when... The Clinton years.

Yeah, is when you have, you know, like Thomas talks about, you know, really the last president, like presidential president we had was George H.W. Bush. Yeah. For all of his faults. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you didn't. Yeah. I mean, obviously, when you go back and you look over things that he talked about what he, what he stood for. I mean, obviously, you're going to disagree with most of it, probably. But he still appeared at, He still kept it. He still had an air that politics had a respectability to it. Yeah. And Clinton just absolutely trashed that. Yeah. Very much so.

I mean, like in the first, I mean, what in his first year, they slaughter how many American citizens? Exactly. That, it's like the entirety of the presidential campaign. campaign to Clinton administration rather is you either got something that was like objectively explicitly leftist political statement or some statement that just responded in a knee-jerk response saying that any criticism of him was just some kind of personal attack. Like the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal, America, the entire media portrayed it as, you know, us insisting on needing about, know about the president's sex life.

And I think that was the one aspect of this whole thing that we weren't particularly concerned with. But the ability of the media to turn people onto talking points that are complete bullshit and to make people think that that's their own preconceived idea is that's their superpower. Yeah. It was really remarkable back in those days. The early years, I wasn't paying close attention, but the latter half of the 90s, I was paying close attention and it was just obvious just how and I think one of the reasons why how it

became obvious to people was Rush was there telling explaining to everybody how what was happening you had people like Rush Limbaugh who were just like yeah yeah we're basically there's no respectability in this and the press is running interference for him Yeah. So this is basically, it was basically its own version of a coup, just not like a military coup. Yeah. And even then, right, I'm somebody who just felt exactly the way something like you and Thomas would about Clinton when he was president. And the interesting thing is I would not consider myself at all a conservative at that time frame, right? And I didn't even like Rush Limbaugh at that time frame. I just, I found him obnoxious. I wasn't a leftist, or yeah, it wasn't any sense. But it was to the point that even people who wouldn't listen to Rush Lemonball and couldn't stand them were objectively opposing Clinton on so many things.

You know, just the degradation of, you know, the office, the way he used health care policy as a blatant expansion of federal policy. The way he latched on to gun control, you know, first as public safety and then as, you know, an explicit target of, of political demographics that he actually came from as a weapon against those demographics. I mean, so many of those things we see today. And it's, as always, the left pretends that they're not doing it. And when they're called out, they call you paranoid. And then the next step, they do it because they were right the first time. And it, you know, the American media cries out in pain as it strikes us.

And it always has. I can't think of a better way to end it. You ever going to get that substack up and going? Yeah, I've got some things. I mean, the hardest part I run into is because I've got so many, you know, aborted writing projects I could start putting up there. It's like, what do you put for the first thing? And you don't want to get typecast in any one thing. So I need to just start posting it there.

Well, that's why you post like 10 different things at once. That's a good idea. That's good idea. Yeah, just drop like 10 things that are like completely unrelated and be like, what the hell's going on here? Holy crap. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the best guy I've followed, and I don't want to just copy him because, you know, copying is just, it's not in any ways creative. But like the guy I really respect right now is a Farrell historian who's on Patreon and YouTube.

But he's somebody who's in a Ph.D. program who dropped out to just continue to do whatever job he did is. But he's got a background, social political history. And he's really good. But he mostly he does is he reviews science fiction novels and then goes through and actually mid-conversations. showing how they explain social political military theories. So he's not really talking about science fiction, though. He's reviewing that, and it's like maybe I'll try something in that vein. But again, I don't want to copy him.

But, yeah, I just need to start writing. Does he have Libertarian Pryors? Does he? Absolutely. I don't know what his politics are. But I'll send you his links. No, I've seen some of his videos on YouTube. And once you get, if you can get past,

fact that he has libertarian uh priors his analysis is pretty good yeah and let's not throw the baby out with the bass water you know i know libertarianism for all of its flaws i mean fundamentally what we want for ourselves is liberty and uh unfortunately we're opposed by people who require us to deal with security and dominance first but uh yeah we want liberty and freedom for ourselves and Unfortunately, we're having to deal with other issues before we can have those, but it doesn't mean you want to throw away those ideals. All right, sir. Thank you very much. Any time, bro.