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Current Events

The Corps Part II

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Received an email from a fellow retired Marine—whom I highly respect—that included the following messages. I share these with you as my second blog post on the current recruiting plan put forth by our CMC significantly touted as, “Operation Semper Fi.”

* * * *

Marine Brothers, one and all. I forwarded this to a select few generals. I intend to email Senator Rick Scott…former navy officer. The words and thoughts are harsh but should not be ignored. I fear we are back to 1947…which way will it go?

I want to share these inciteful comments from a distinguished Marine, the father of two outstanding Marine officers (one infantry, the other combat engineer), both of whom had multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I feel sorry for the head of recruiting. At the same time that the CMC insults and denigrates previous generations of Marines and their flawed culture he is trying to rally retired Generals and Marines to help the Corps recruit. Sending it to retired Generals is preaching to the crowd that at about 80-90% supported or fell silent on the critical issues of perversion, depravity, fraternization, reverse racism, sexual preference for women, unisex uniforms, women in the combat arms, the elimination of tanks, tube artillery, numerous infantry Bn’s, 25% of F-35’s and CH-53F’s, female grooming standards, 18 months of maternity leave, the destruction of the MAGTF concept, the vapid attacks on the culture of the Corps and its racist/sexist heritage. Add to that a bevy of Generals who went from Warriors to politicians and openly and repeatedly insulted a sitting President.

 A Marine four- star CINC presided over a catastrophic NEO from Kabul taking orders from the Taliban about who, what, when, how, and why and then fled in the dark of the night with his tail tucked between his legs.

Our beloved Corps is at an historic low point with few allies on the Hill and an American people who view us as mere victims. Eighty percent of our Generals appear to have been intellectual midgets without a spine, charisma, presence, or persuasive verbal skills. They appear be average to below average men by every measure. When the time to stand up and be counted came, they opted to pass. This made it even harder for those willing to do the right things, the right way, for the right reasons.

We know who has a high propensity to enlist and we don’t want them. Instead, we chase after the misanthropes, the gender confused, the lost souls, and those we know are poorly suited to the battlefield. We encourage those to join the Corps whose interests are totally self-serving, to then change the Corps.

The Corps must reassess the culture it has abandoned if it expects the endorsement and support from those who have retired. I cannot, at this juncture, encourage an 18 year old to join the Corps. I say that with a very heavy heart.”

I must admit that with a very heavy heart, I have already convinced one 18-year-old to forego his lifelong desire to become a Marine and go on to college in hopes that—just maybe with God’s help—the Corps will be back on track.

* * * *

Another highly respected Marine known to me wrote:

Sometime back, I opined that the success of Berger’s “Great Leap Forward,” his “re-imagining” of our beloved Corps to make it more “representative of our country,” would be reflected in the retention rates of serving Marines and the recruiting of new ones. The following is from a Brother Marine regarding the missive recently sent to all retired Marine generals by the CG, USMC Recruiting Command requesting their support of “Operation Semper Fi:”

“My response: I will watch… but if they think they can muster Marine Veteran support if they continue the march to “woke land” …and all that implies including fostering Marxist ideology masquerading as modern liberalism they are sadly mistaken. Veterans will support traditional Marine values not forced ideas that are counter to common sense and successful traditional values. The thinking of those forcing the “new order” is being brought to us by the same people or their progeny that abandoned us in Vietnam and tried their best to turn the entire country against us—they failed but as a result they are now working from the inside of government (civilian and military) to have their way.”

Please stand by Marines, and others. There is much more to come in the ensuing days regarding this disgusting issue. It will end with my open letter to General Berger!

 

 

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What’s Wrong?

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A Majority of White Democrats Have Become Non-Christian

And what that means for America.

While this article may be somewhat dated, I found his information vital  as well as his predictions concerning the future of religion in America and the impact it will have on our once great nation. See what you think and please feel free to give me your comments.

By Daniel Greenfield

In Obama’s first year in office, 68% of white Democrats described themselves as Christians, 7% claimed to be members of other faiths, and 24% said that they had no religious affiliation.

A decade later, only 47% of white Democrats call themselves Christians. 10% are members of other faiths, and 42% have no religion.

A majority of white Democrats have ceased to be Christian.

The Obama era transformed the country and the party. It’s often observed that the Democrats of the JFK era are not the Democrats of today. But forget 1961, an era that is receding into the shadows of history. The Democrats of 2019 are not the Democrats of 2009. We are a different nation because of it.

The results of the Pew survey are startling and yet unsurprising. They explain why the Democrat debate stage included a cult leader and a call to go after churches and synagogues that don’t back gay marriage.

Not even Obama would have proposed such a thing in 2009. But much has changed since then.

Obama was born in 1961. 67% of Generation X was Christian. Millennials are now a quarter of the electorate and they are evenly divided between Christians and non-Christians. Generation Z represents another 9% of the electorate and it’s been described as the least religious generation ever.

Beto O’Rourke’s proposals to confiscate guns or go after the tax-exempt status of traditional religious organizations only seem radical to older voters. They’re not radical to the younger voters he’s courting.

O’Rourke, Sanders, and Buttigieg all endorsed abortion until the moment of birth. As has been noted, this position is far more radical than the one Obama ran on. But so is the 2019 Democrat electorate.

While Buttigieg and Booker try to tap into lefty pseudo-religious politics, O’Rourke dispenses with the phony religion by appealing to the new rising demographics of the Democrats. And, despite the headline, those demographics are not only white. The decline among minority Democrats has not been as dramatic as among white Democrats, but the number of black Democrats who describe themselves as Christian still fell from 84% to 74% from 2009 to 2018-2019. Hispanic Christian identification among Democrats declined from 82% to 71%. Among Democrats as a whole, only 55% identify as Christian.

That’s down from 72% in 2009.

Generational shifts will see older, more religious Democrats making way for a new generation. Before long a majority of all Democrats will no longer identify as Christians or as religious believers.

The Democrats have not only adopted values that are fundamentally hostile to traditional religious believers, but the demographics show that they are living out those values. And, as Beto O’Rourke demonstrated, see less reason to hide them or to pay lip service to religiosity in an irreligious party.

At current rates, Catholics will form a larger share of the GOP than of the Democrats. Protestants, who made up 46% of the Democrats in 2009, have declined to 35%, falling from nearly half to a little over a third. 1 in 5 Democrats have never attended religious services.

Republicans and Democrats are no longer divided by their approach to religion, but by religion itself.

And this loss of any common set of values has tremendous implications for the conflicts tearing the country apart. Democrats and Republicans have less in common than they ever did before, including during the conflict that tore apart the country and left 620,000 men lying on the nation’s battlefields.

What were once debates over issues increasingly became cultural divides, generation gaps, racial conflicts, and now, religious divides, that are becoming impossible to bridge. Americans find it harder than ever to compromise on the issues or to even care about the issues, because their differences and divisions have become the real issue. Everything else is becoming a mere marker of the divisions.

The changing Democrats demographics did not come out of nowhere, but the swiftness of the sea change within a decade is also a forerunner of the changes that will transform politics as we know it.

Republicans will increasingly face a Democrat opposition that does not have a different vision of religion, but that treats it at best as an odd superstition, and, at worst, a destructive and evil set of beliefs.

The First Amendment, already under assault, will face the same attacks that were visited on the Second.

The Second Amendment is under siege because a sizable percentage of the country, primarily living in urban and suburban areas, sees no legitimate reason why anyone would want to own a gun. That is the essence of the gun control argument. Everything else is propaganda, narrative, and meaningless noise.

The Democrats are on track to becoming a political party whose base sees freedom of religion as an equally outmoded historical relic envisioned by old, dead white slave owners who had strange beliefs. They don’t and won’t see why anyone should have the right to have hateful beliefs or read hateful texts.

What will religious freedom look like when the average Democrat views religion the way that he does firearms?

We are about to find out.

America is not entering uncharted territory. It’s following in the footsteps of Europe. In the UK, only 3% of 18-24 year olds identify as Anglicans, and only 5% as Catholics, among 25-34 year olds, 5% identify as Anglicans and 9% as Catholics. 64% of 18-24 year olds say that they have no religion, as do 57% of 25-34 year olds, and 60% of 35-44 year olds.

Freedom of religion cannot survive under these conditions. And indeed, that is the case in the UK.

People have to believe in something and being convinced that their children will die because people won’t stop using plastic bags and straws is a belief. It’s the sort of belief that leads to genocide. As is the conviction that religion, nationality, and every non-approved identity must be stamped out for equality.

The decline of religion is not leading us to a more tolerant world. Instead, it’s intolerance that’s rising.

And that’s inevitable.

Tolerance for differing beliefs originated from religious differences. America has freedom of conscience because it was founded by settlers and colonists fleeing religious persecution who then had to determine how to deal with religious dissent in their own ranks. The ideological fanatics driving the Democrats come from a leftist radicalism that has never learned to cope with political differences.

It lacks the toolset of tolerance. And does not even recognize that it applies to political enemies.

The Democrats have embraced a new idea of diversity that applies to every possible variety of skin color and sexual combination, as long as its members unwaveringly share their beliefs on every single issue. Their politics embraces everything, and as everything is politicized, the only remaining dissents allowed are on matters so trivial, or obscure, that they cannot be politicized. This is the new tolerance.

In a decade, the Democrats were almost incomprehensibly transformed. And the country with them.

To understand why America is being torn apart, why its political norms are shattering, and talk of civil war is in the air, we must begin with the fundamental transformation, not of the government, but of us.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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Leftism in Today’s USMC

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Received this in an email from a highly respected retired Marine Colonel friend of mine. They are his words, not mine, but I wholeheartedly agree with his assessment.

“I wonder how much longer this Marine will be tolerated by the present “leadership.” When they see he is an attorney maybe they will be careful as to how to shut him up. What’s going on is very difficult to believe.”

From an opinion piece in Newsweek, Saturday 20 March 2021

In the Marine Corps, we don’t have quotas, but we do have goals. And Marines accomplish goals,” my officer-in-charge told me and a few other brand-new second lieutenants, each of us assigned to temporary recruiting duty while awaiting orders to Quantico. The captain then told us we had to sign up a certain number of college-enrolled racial minorities and females. No need to be too strict on physical fitness or academics, he said. Just bring them in.

That was in 2009. Discrimination of this sort has been an ingrained yet lamentable part of the military’s recruitment, retention and promotion practices for many years. But my fellow officers and I couldn’t have imagined that, 12 years later, our disagreement with these policies would get us labeled “racist,” “sexist,” “bigoted” or “extremists” worthy of “eradication” and “elimination” from the USMC. Yet the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps said as much in his February 22 “core values” memo.

I’m now a major in the Marine Corps Reserve and a member of a formerly all-male infantry battalion.* This past weekend we had our monthly drill period. A few days before drill, the command told us that all scheduled training on Sunday morning was canceled and replaced with a “stand-down to address extremism in the ranks.”

It was left-wing political programming, as direct as it sounds.

We were instructed that there is a Taliban-like threat in the United States called “domestic terrorism.” These terrorists are characterized in part by “anti-government,” “anti-authority” or “abortion-related” extremism and various “supremacist” ideas. None of these terms are defined. The Marine Corps entrusts the government’s HR department to figure that out.

Reporting requirements are key. Do you suspect someone supports an “extremist ideology?” Alert the chain of command. Have you heard a Marine express “contempt toward officials?” Notify the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Don’t handle anything on your own. Just rat them out. After all, “service is a privilege” and it’d be a shame to lose that privilege for failing to do your part to stamp out “extremists.” One PowerPoint slide posed this imperative in stark terms: “Do you want to be a Marine or do you want to be part of an organization that sows disunity and hate. You cannot have divided loyalties.”

Where did all this come from? Soft liberalism has taken root in the military over several decades. These alarming trends are already well documented in James Hasson’s book Stand Down: How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military. But in the wake of President Joe Biden’s election—and more precipitously since the January 6 “insurrection”—bureaucratic progressivism has hardened into iron-fisted wokeism.

January 6 provided the pretext that the government, media and Democratic Party needed to drum up paranoia about white-nationalist domestic terrorism. A month later, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memo to all Pentagon leadership laying the groundwork for my unit’s Sunday morning indoctrination.

In his memo, Austin announced that the Department of Defense “will not tolerate…actions associated with extremist or dissident ideologies” and ordered all 1.4 million personnel to receive “extremism” training. And he promised it was just the beginning: the “stand-down is just the first initiative of what I believe must be a concerted effort to…eliminate the corrosive effects that extremist ideology and conduct have on the workforce.”

Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Harker followed with his own memo. He announced the objective for the entire Navy Department: nothing short of “eradicating extremism.” How? By rooting out “actions that betray our oaths” like promoting “ideology” or “doctrine” that challenges the “gender identity and sexual orientation” agenda or advancing efforts that allegedly “deprive individuals of their civil rights.”

In other words, advocating for the Biblical view of sex and marriage in law and policy is, according to today’s armed forces, tantamount to oath betrayal.

Then came the Marine Corps’ turn to mouth the right things about “extremism.” In late February, the highest-ranking enlisted Marine issued a memo to all hands condemning our institutional failure to “completely eliminate,” “eradicate,” and “conquer” all “racists, bigots, homophobes, and bullies.” Those people “are not welcome” in the military. “It is impossible,” the memo says, “to be both a good Marine and be any one of those things at the same time.” Again, specifics of “those things” are undefined. The author of the memo and the four-star Commandant leave that to the military’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force.

Finally, on March 5, the Marine Corps released an official directive: no later than April 2, all “commanders and supervisors at all levels will conduct and document a leadership stand-down in order to address issues of extremism in the ranks.” The commandant included a video with the directive, saying, “We must continuously strive to eliminate any division in our ranks.”

We all know what that means: any dissension on any issue that Biden-appointed top brass says is racist, sexist or homophobic will not be tolerated.

There is no doubt as to where all this is headed. The Pentagon’s swift and coordinated “smiting” of Tucker Carlson, who had the gall to “diss” the idea of sending pregnant women to war—an obviously absurd idea to all but the most politically correct officers grasping for a promotion—makes it very clear.

How did we get here? The truth is that today’s military is running on the fumes of our vastly superior forefathers and the ever-shrinking proportion of each branch that still does truly heroic work and accomplishes truly extraordinary feats. The rest is a bloated military-industrial complex given over to Fortune 500-style corporate progressivism.

And if it’s bad in the Marine Corps, imagine how much worse it is in the other services.

America’s enemies are laughing at us. Frankly, we deserve it. But it doesn’t need to be this way. To get back on top, our military must reject “extremism” training, reverse all the progressive policies enacted over the past several years, return to a true meritocracy and focus exclusively on the only thing that matters: winning wars.

We need a military fit for real warriors—not the social justice kind.

Aaron Reitz is a Major in the USMC Reserve, an Afghanistan War veteran and the Texas Deputy Attorney General for Legal Strategy.

* I prepared this article off-duty and in my personal capacity. The views I express here are solely mine and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy or the Office of the Attorney General of Texas.

For the life of me I cannot understand how a dedicated hard charging Marine, Enlisted or Officer could stay in a Marine Corps such as this?

I agree with my friend’s comments in that I also wonder how the leftist leaders in our once great Corps will handle this Major. Bravo Zulu for him speaking out. Get em’ Major.