Now go spend 32 hours cutting the corners off every piece of paper on the ship.
Wait, which is meant to be serving and protecting the people? Because it isn’t the police, and I don’t think it’s the military… 🤔
I think in theory the police are meant to. But the ‘theory’ part of that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The National Guard protects and serves quite a bit after natural disasters. Maybe it’s referring to that?
They’ve also made it clear they want to cut military and veteran benefits. It’s surprising they think the military will be absolutely loyal to them if they try to power grab and go full dictator.
I was a medic in the AF - it was a pretty even split of red and blue. Air Force medical is probably the bluest slice of the military there is, so overall there’s definitely a strong lean red, but there’s this weird notion of absolution when it comes to the military’s political loyalty. Worse case scenario, Trump gets elected and attempts to ‘execute order 66’ …the military will implode on itself with infighting, and my money’s on one of the troops will take an opportunistic shot at him in accordance with their Oath of Enlistment’s promise to defend the constitution against domestic enemies. Officers and civilian federal employees oath has the same language.
Edit - Also, Donald Trump fucking hates us. If anyone ‘supports the troops’ they’ll vote blue.
I’m currently in the AF. Can confirm, we’re a snapshot of the country. Not some frothing red dog.
The military isn’t a democracy: If the top of the hierarchy is following Donald’s orders, everyone else will be too…
Edit - Also, Donald Trump fucking hates us. If anyone ‘supports the troops’ they’ll vote blue.
Yeah, but nobody who goes out of their way to advertise that they “support the troops” actually gives a shit about them. It’s always been jingoistic performative nonsense.
I tried Mission BBQ one time and their jingoism was just absurd. Their notion of supporting the troops is delivering barbecue in a Hummer and selling $2 plastic cups with (some of) the proceeds going to veterans in some vague way. Of course their worst crime is that their barbecue sucks.
If he loses and tries to claim a stolen election, project 2025 promising a bloodbath will not go well for any of them. Especially since Trump continues to disrespect military personnel at every turn.
I know there are some maga nuts in the ranks, but last I heard most generals have spoken out against the Trumpet crumpet.
Military leadership in the U.S. has always traditionally leaned pro-U.S. If it came down to it there would be fewer Trump allies the higher up you go. Exceptions though, always exceptions.
Trying really hard to not draw parallels with that scene in Winter Soldier where it’s announced that some agents are Hydra while some are SHIELD and they turn on one another.
My impression has been that the USA air force is perhaps the branch of the armed forces that is most controlled by high ranking evangelicals. Is there any reality basis to this belief?
No idea how it compares to the other branches. Would be an interesting question to run by one of those crazies who served in like all of them (one of the nurses I worked with in the AF then had previously been a Marine and soldier. I’ve had patients who claimed to have served in Marines, Army, Navy, and AF, but no way to tell of they’re full of shit or insane enough to actually do that (the amount of paperwork that would translate to…).
Anyway, in AF med they’d hit us with the occasional “the lord willing” or something in official functions like change of command ceremonies or squadron "all-call"s, which was definitely crossed the line of what I’d consider acceptable (it should be 100% secular), but that’s the extent of it. No down-throat-ism or pressure to convert or anything.
Also, Donald Trump fucking hates us. If anyone ‘supports the troops’ they’ll vote blue.
Wow! I was expecting a link to one incident but there was a list of many, many unrelated incidents. He really does hate the military.
Thanks for the link!
Yeah his scandal-per-day tactic seemed to work pretty well - keeping up with his bullshit is a full time job, and we literally don’t have the mental realestate to keep track.
And it drives me nuts… almost all of those would be a career-ender for a normal politician, but Trump gets away with it again and again because by the time we’ve processed just how bad one thing is, he’s commited 3 or 4 more.
To highlight just how bad cutting VA benefits would be, only 18% of veterans get the benefits they’re entitled to.
Because the country would go bankrupt if everyone got what they deserve (with the way the budget is now)
There’s a model for this. Basically, the reason you see dictatorships having a Republican Guard. Those guys are the loyalists that will do anything for the dictator and they get sinecure positions and help if they’re hurt. The rest of the military is lucky to get rations because the dictator is worried about other people using them to end their reign.
The total transition would take awhile but Trying was already effectively using the Department of Justice and federal agents to run a Republican Guard during the BLM protests.
The military is filled with the most loyal beaten dogs in America. Master can beat them as much as he wants and they’ll never bite.
We have no idea how this would play out. Internal military use is right there in the coup playbook, and top military leaders know this and surely have privately considered it. Would they tell him to fuck off? Maybe. Whatever they would do, if it gets to that point, they’re betting their legacies and their lives on their choice.
Alex Jones fixated on Posse Comitatus at the tail end of W’s second term and Obama’s first term, melding it with the idea that FEMA was ready to incarcerate millions of Americans in concentration camps after taking away hundreds of millions of guns, and turn cities into walled off, controlled ingress/egress zones akin to a prequel to Escape From New York.
And now here we are a decade+ after that, with him having been on the ground for and whipping people into an actual insurrection, supporting a fascist who seems to want to actually do things approaching fairly close to his fever dreams of years past, invoking what was once a huge piece of his ‘plan for total enslavement’ or whatever he called it.
Yeah, Alex Jones was actually right on some of the weirdo extremist things he was claiming being planned, it’s just that he was part of those plans to begin with.
One of the problems with having your “truth tellers” rely on commercial sales to get the news out. Jones went from a guy who would mainstream generic fringe views of every conceivable quality to a guy who exclusively dealt in far-right conspiracy theories because that’s where the money was at.
Joe Rogan is on a similar arc. The longer he churns out episodes, the more fascist his guests and his “common sense” views become. And then you look at his advertisers…
It’s the same way with all the preppers and the people stockpiling an arsenal because “government comin’ to get ya”. For the most part, these are the people that will gleefully take up arms against their own countrymen if they are given the go-ahead from a fascist government. They won’t fight against a fascist government.
There are more civilian owned guns than people in the US, and yeah, a lot of it is from basically people that are building a personal armory.
Hell, there’s a whole commonly repeated mantra amongst many guntubers that ‘one is none and two is one’ that is basically a thought stopping cliche that also shames people into always purchasing a backup gun roughly equivalent to their primary ‘just in case’.
When it comes to the people with personal armories… I guarantee that the vast majority (not literally all, but most) of those kinds of people are such assholes, such antisocial totalitarians in their personal lives that they either arent going to have any friends to use all those extra guns, or their ‘friends’ will just take one and leave after armory man is an asshole long enough.
Functionally, all these goobers have done is made the equivalent of loot boxes or mini dungeons with guns as the prize in an actual SHTF scenario.
He already did this in Portland once:https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/bioethics/article/view/6765
Reminder that this shit isn’t new with him
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-defense-secretary
