#townhall.com

News broke Tuesday that the FBI put threat tags on parents protesting at school board meetings. The information was exposed by a whistleblower, who brought a memo detailing the tagging to members of Congress.

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In an effort to do damage control, the FBI released a statement arguing the practice is standard and compared parents to drug dealers and human traffickers.

The idea that “diversity, equity, and inclusion are necessities in U.S. military” is maybe the stupidest thing ever asserted by the Biden regime, which is saying something. You sit back and look at a pronouncement like this, which was apparently written and disseminated on purpose, and you really have to marvel. If the Pentagon had reincarnated the greatest failures in all of military history to work together to come up with something so transcendently dumb that it would have made Varro, the dumbass Roman consul who decided “Yeah, Cannae is just the place to show that uppity Hannibal fellow what for - see how weak his center is!”, look like, well, Hannibal.

It would be funny if this kind of unserious idiocy was not going to get scores of our troops killed. In fact, scores of our troops have already gotten killed through gross incompetence, 13 of them in Afghanistan during Operation Utter Failure. And more will die. War is serious business and in America, it is being overseen by fatally unserious people obsessed with liberal wine women fetishes like “diversity, inclusion and equity” (DIE) instead of combat readiness. They will put the “die” in “DIE.”

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Then there’s China. Who thinks Xi is going to wait to assimilate Taiwan until Biden departs? It’s not like Xi is going to face a less competent opponent next unless Kamala gets elected in 2024, and the chances of that are, charitably, low. This is his time. He knows it. The smart people here and in Taiwan know it. Does our failed national security state know it? Probably – anyone can see it – but our Pentagon is busy fighting the real enemy. You know, the weather and insurrectionist Americans who refuse to concede that some men can menstruate. 

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Yeah, in a time of serious challenges, our punchline Pentagon is engaging in unserious posturing designed not to defeat America’s enemies but to garner more stars on the epaulets of a bunch of general officers who have not won a real war in 31 years.

I remember that. I was there in the desert, far in the rear at a corps headquarters, when America’s DIE-deficient military mauled an entire national army in 100 hours of ground combat. Our enemies feared us in the wake of our merciless triumph. But what are our foes to make of this word salad of faculty lounge clichés that we’re spewing today? They will assess, correctly, that we are not a serious military. Sure, we have some residual capabilities, but they are fading as time rolls on and Navy ships run into each other or catch fire in port. We are Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Every day, we sit in Saigon getting wreaker and Charlie squats out there in the bush getting stronger.

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Understand that this essential unseriousness about our military is why you see all the focus on “special ops.” There’s got to be some aspect of the military that is still sort of serious, though the woke pathogen is invading the SOCOM community too. We pretend that America is strong because a glorified platoon of highly-trained highly-resourced guys – and it is all guys – goes in and smokes some terrorists. But news flash – the military is not the Rangers or Green Berets or SEALs. It’s regular companies of infantry. It’s swabbies making big ships go and zoomies making airplanes fly. And it's in the regular units that we’re failing.

Here’s the reality – soldiers do what the commander checks. If the commander checks combat readiness, then combat readiness is what he gets. But if he checks wokeness, if he prioritizes the CRT dogma that has wrecked academia and corporate America, then he gets a woke military that can’t win a war.

So, I was out at dinner with my old battalion commander – literally outside, because dining inside apparently is super deadly if you live under blue tyranny – and we were laughing at this whole “Muh Insurrekshun” nonsense. What happened January 6 was no “insurrection” in any meaningful sense of the word, especially not to those who survived the riots of 2020, and not to us either. See, I was my old battalion commander’s assistant operations officer and I was riding with him in his HUMVEE driving through Los Angeles as it burned in April 1992.

That was a riot. What happened on Capitol Hill was a few dudes dressed like Conan the Fauxbarian acting like fools and occasionally fighting with the cops while a few hundred other dudes took selfies in the Rotunda.

We were in the 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry, the first combat arms unit on the street during the LA Riot, a riot brought to you by Maxine Waters and other idiots, by the way. There was burning and looting and dozens we can say with absolute certainty were murdered by the LA rioters, unlike at the Capitol. It lasted for days. You wouldn’t know it from Rep. Stolen Cower, who seems to claim she suffered PTSD from being at the far end of the same ZIP code as the bruhaha, but what happened on January 6 was no “insurrection,” and Republicans need to stop playing along with the Establishment talking point that it was.

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Now, I also had the chance to see the wreckage of a real insurrection when I was in Kosovo with the Army after the fighting ended. An insurrection means ruins and mass graves, not some dude in a horn hat wandering around the House as a police officer asks him to chill. Don’t let them define insurrection down to mean “Anything conservatives do.”

You know, I am still not tired of all the winning. Imagine having a Republican president conserva-woke enough to issue an executive order banning the poisonous lies of critical race theory from being inflicted upon our federal workforce. Well, we do have a president fearless enough to fight back, boldly and publicly, against the noxious propaganda of the academic left we taxpayers have been shelling out millions to pay commie consultants for. And he did it in the face of the utterly predictable narrative that “Trump is racist for prohibiting indoctrinating government employees with the idea that people are good or bad based on their race!”

Do you think a Jeb!, or a Mitt! or even a Nikki! would dare stand up to that kind of heat? No, they’d be kneeling, begging for absolution from the NYT and WaPo for the sins of the GOP base not wanting to pay moral and/or financial reparations for slaves they never owned to people who were never owned.

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The culture war is that thing the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” smart set of spineless Fredocons, who are all in on the “socially liberal” part but never get around to the “fiscally conservative” part, have told us for decades is a sure loser. Now, normally one should defer to the Fredocons on losing since they are the indisputable experts, but the fact that for decades the GOP establishment refused to fight about things that our base was concerned with led to a society where people tell you their pronouns and insist dudes can get preggers. Fiscal and foreign policy stuff is important, but when some dude dangles his doings in your daughter’s locker room because now he insists that he is no longer Charlie but is, instead, Charlotte, that’s a problem. And the geniuses kept telling us “Hush, knuckledraggers, we’re too busy trying to ship your job to China because Milton Freidman told us to and we don’t have time to icky fights over the things you care about that might get us called hayseeds at the next Georgetown mixer.”

All this garbage the left has pushed on us – from racial self-loathing to gender idiocy to killing babies – has catastrophic real-world consequences on real people and the people who presumed to lead us didn’t want to risk the kool kidz of kultur wagging their collective fingers at them. Trump not only cares but counterattacks.

That’s why the executive order getting the government out of the racial grievance business is so important. Finally, we are able to exercise our brand of power – political power, since we control the executive branch – to push back against the unaccountable and totally left cultural power of the establishment. And it’s not only the president.

We’re all supposed to applaud the kneeling zillionaires of the NFL – the most spoiled bunch of jerks on planet earth – and yet when they came out and tried to rub their cultural power in our faces, when they tried to make us just sit there and silently be insulted presented by the felons, losers, and accused sex offenders whose names were emblazoned on their helmets, tons of us refused to tune in and those who showed up live booed these pretentious twits. How dare those peasants refuse to submit to the cultural commandments of their betters!

And then there was the reaction to the despicable Netflix Cuties film, a child molester’s fantasia that disgusted the nation. Look, far be it from me to stop the blue bubble-dwelling cultural elite from selecting “You dumb Jesus people don’t appreciate why pedophilia is no big deal” as their hill to die on. As long as they die on some hill I’m not too picky about which one, but if they want to choose the one that’s even going to creep out a lot of the Democrat Party’s voters, go for it. 

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But we’re now fighting back. People are furious with Netflix, and it seems as if the Obama-affiliated VOD service was actually stunned that people objected. After all, cultural decency rarely penetrates into the deep blue bubble, and the idea that telling someone “Hey, your perversion is not okay” is totally alien to their caste. The cultural critics adored Cuties and were scandalized that anyone might be offended by the horrific sexualization of pre-teen girls. Alyssa Rosenberg of the WaPo fumed: “If conservatives, who have jumped on the debate over #Cuties, want to be taken seriously as cultural arbiters, they have to be able to talk about the *text* of a movie like this in an honest, responsible way.” Well, if the price of the total rejection of pedo exploitation of kids is having people in blue metro enclaves not take us seriously, we’re ready to pay it.

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There are three questions that our terrible, terrible ruling class raises whenever it opens its collective kale-hole to lecture us: 1) Does the elite think we are really, really stupid, or 2) Is the elite really, really stupid, or 3) Is the elite all of the above? The last week has been eventful, even by Age O’ Trump standards, and the one enduring takeaway is just how bad these people are at gaslighting us with inept lies that demand we disbelieve what’s happening right in front of us. But it should come as no surprise that our alleged betters are no good at gaslighting because they have proven themselves to be no good at anything.

Here’s a fun test: can you name something – anything – major in the last two decades that our best and brightest have not screwed up?

I’ll wait.

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So, because they have no other way to deal with the damning evidence of their utter incompetence, our elite instead tries to convince us that we are crazy for noticing just how lame they are. That’s called “gaslighting,” the straight-faced denial of what’s happening right in front of you that tries to leverage your politeness and deference to convince you that it’s not the elite that’s rotten. You’re just crazy for noticing, you crazed crazy person of craziness.

Take the Northern Syrian crisis – please. I generally side with the non-commie Kurds over the Turks, but facts are facts and facts mean something. We keep hearing how we “betrayed our allies,” but who promised the Kurds that we would fight Turkey on their behalf? It’s a big jump from “Let’s both fight ISIS” to “Take that, NATO ally.” But our garbage media, and our garbage politicians, sort of hand wave away the fact that you can’t “betray” someone by not doing what you never promised to do, especially when no reasonable person could ever expect you to do it.

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How about the response on Capitol Hill? We’ve got a bunch of politicians posing and posturing and prancing about over this border incursion half-way around the world and we’re sitting here wishing they would devote some of that wailing and teeth-gnashing to the incursions over our border. But once again, they act like we can’t see the truth sitting right there. As for the Democrats, well, how long would their support have lasted if Trump had used force against…our NATO ally? “You’re helping Putin!” they would shriek. Of course, they are currently shrieking, “You’re helping Putin!” when Trump doesn’t use force against Turkey.

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And then there’s the phony outrage over some silly meme where fake Donald Trump fights fake logos of the fake news. They insist that this year-old YouTube clip is going to spark terrifying violence against…I guess, CNN and MSNBC logos. Of course, these trademarks have remained unassaulted since this silly, fakey vid was created, but never mind that – this is the worst thing ever! Also, you must ignore the fact that the original movie scene the meme was based upon featured the hero massacring a church full of conservative Christians in Kentucky.

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Donald Trump came into office promising to not start any new wars and to get us out of the old ones our feckless elite had dragged us into, and now that he’s doing it in Syria the usual suspects are outraged. How dare he actually deliver on his promise not to have anymore of our precious warriors shipped home in boxes after getting killed on battlefields we can’t even pronounce, while refereeing conflicts that began long before America was a thing, in campaigns without any kind of coherent objective?

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Moreover, we keep hearing about our “obligation” to the Kurds, but who is the genius who promised the Kurds that if Turkey attacked the United States would go to war? Would that promise be binding on us if it were? After all, I don’t recall my senators voting on a treaty – after debate and with accountability to us voters – agreeing to put American lives on the line to protect the sovereignty of hypothetical Kurdistan. This idea that some sort of obligation for America to defend another people can arise outside the treaty ratification process is as bizarre as it is unconstitutional. Now we’re supposed to shed our blood because our elites feel we owe it to foreign strangers?

I do note that there is one treaty, duly signed and ratified by the Senate, at play here. That’s the NATO treaty under which we agreed to go to war to defend Turkey if attacked. If Erdogan, that thug, were more cunning he would assert Article 5 and demand NATO forces come to Turkey’s defense against the cross-border attacks by the PKK.

None of this is to justify what Turkey is doing. I hope the tough and brave non-communist Kurds bloody these bullies’ noses. But I cannot think of any way to adequately explain to the mom and dad of a 20-year-old 82nd Airborne 11 Bravo paratrooper from Rancho Cucamonga why their son got his head blown off in Northern Syria fighting the Kurd’s war for them.

In the Army War College, they drilled into us the necessity of a clearly defined objective as the foundation of every successful military operation. If you do not know exactly what you wish to achieve, you cannot plan and execute effectively. Okay critics, what’s our proposed objective in Northern Syria? Stop with the clichés about “betrayals” and “abandoning allies” and tell me – exactly – what we would seek to achieve. And then tell me – again, exactly – how many dead Americans we should sacrifice to achieve it.

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Let’s be clear – and I need to be crystal clear because the gung ho gang’s MO is to mischaracterize its opponents’ views to distract from the strategic bankruptcy of its own – that fighting for the Kurds would not be immoral. It’s a good cause, but we can’t intervene every time there’s a good cause. Iraq was a good cause, and a disaster. I’d come back on active duty, if the Army was that desperate, and serve there proudly. Our troops will do everything we ask of them and more. They will lay down their lives for this cause if we send them. And that’s the point.

Dunking on the mainstream media is as easy as tripping a fat kid in a cast, except we would probably feel sorry for a fat kid in a cast who we tripped and sent slamming into the pavement piehole first. Unless the fat kid in a cast was a mainstream media journalist, in which case it would be totally hilarious.

They hate you, so feel free to hate them back. The MSM was not infuriated with Donald Trump when he called these hack transcriptionists for the liberal elite “the enemy of the people” because he was lying. The MSM was infuriated with Donald Trump because he was telling the truth.

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Worse, the mainstream media is an enemy that considers you unworthy of the courtesy of not lying to your face about obvious things. Liberal journalists have such contempt for us that they won’t even make the effort to gaslight us properly any more. Maybe it’s because liberal journalists think you are dumb. Maybe liberal journalists are themselves dumb. Or maybe – probably – it’s some combination of the two. But they are no longer even showing you the respect of trying to pretend that they are not lying to you.

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Imagine what a real media would do faced with overwhelming evidence that the previous administration used the FBI, CIA and NSA to spy on the other party’s political campaign. Yeah, they might be a tiny bit interested in unraveling a scandal that, comparatively, makes Watergate look like pulling off a mattress tag. But no. Not only are they actively not curious about this almost unbelievable outrage, but they are actively attempting to cover it up on behalf of their liberal masters.

“How dare you call covert surveillance of an opponent designed to secretly obtain confidential information ‘spying’?” they fume.

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Oh, the liberal journalists won’t come out and say they support censorship, but they do. There’s always an excuse, always a reason, why shutting up a conservative is just fine. Oh, so-and-so is an “extremist.” He is uttering “hate speech.” He is “dangerous.” Why, gagging him is cool because Facetwittergram is “a private company.” Their lame excuses for censorship may change, but in the end, every time, you will find the final conclusion of our glorious mainstream media guardians of free speech is that prohibiting the conservative opponents of their masters’ free speech is A-OK.

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We should all be ready to do our duty as American citizens and, when duty calls, each of us should embrace our inner Rooftop Korean.

The year was 1992, 27 years ago right about now, and the city was Los Angeles. Several police officers who got into a videotaped brawl with a petty criminal named Rodney King were acquitted of beating him up. The city exploded. It was chaos.

I was a first-year law student, back a year from the Gulf War, and I had just joined the California Army National Guard. My unit was the 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry, and we got called up early the first night and were on the streets for three long weeks. Making it even more delightful was the fact that the unit was in Inglewood, which was pretty much on fire. They burned most everything around, except our armory – that would have gone badly for them – and the Astro Burger.

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The city went insane. Order simply ceased to exist. It was Lord of the Flies. I remember a cop totally breaking down because everything was completely out of control.

But I had a M16A1 – a real assault rifle – and I had a bunch of buddies with M16A1s. The regular folks … not so much. The decent people of LA were terrified, and with good reason. See, the dirty little secret of civilization is that it’s designed to maintain order when 99.9% of folks are orderly. But, say, if just 2% of folks stop playing by the rules…uh oh. Say LA’s population was 15 million in 1992…that’s 300,000 bad guys. There were maybe 20,000 cops in all the area agencies then, plus 20,000 National Guard soldiers and airman, plus another 10,000 active soldiers and Marines the feds brought in. Law enforcement is based on the concept that most people will behave and that the crooks will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers of officers. But in the LA riots, law enforcement was massively outnumbered. Imposing order took time.

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LA’s Korean shopkeepers knew that. They operated many small businesses in some of the least fashionable areas of Los Angeles, and they were already widely hated by activists, being scapegoated for problems and pathologies that long pre-dated their immigration to Southern California. So, they became targets for the mobs.

Bad decision by the mobs.

See, most of these Koreans had done their mandatory service in the Republic of Korea’s Army. Those ROK soldiers are the real deal – the Norks are not a theoretical threat and the South Korean army does not spend a lot of time talking about feelings. They were some solid dudes. So, when the local dirtbags showed up for some casual looting, they noticed the rooftops were lined with hardcore guys packing some serious heat, including the kind of scary rifles that the Democrats want to ban.

The Rooftop Koreans.

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Our first responders are awesome, but it takes nothing away from their heroism to point out that the title “first responder” is a misnomer. The citizens on site are the first responders. And they should be ready to respond. We all should. Personally.

Some duties of citizen should never be outsourced. If you are an able-bodied adult, it’s your duty to know how to stop the bleeding and give CPR until the pros who do it for a living arrive. And it’s your duty (and right) to defend yourself, your family, your community and your Constitution. With guns – effective guns, which sometimes means your concealed pistol and sometimes means the guns that those who want you defenseless call “assault weapons.”

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