Defense One is an online magazine that focuses on the topic of military defense and national security.
John Nagl is a retired Army officer and is Head of School at The Haverford School. Paul Yingling is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. Both are radical partisan Leftists.
They collaborated on this article for Defense One:
“. . . All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic”: An Open Letter to Gen. Milley
If the commander in chief attempts to ignore the election’s results, you will face a choice.
Prepare for some crazy paranoid bullshit fanaticizing.
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you are well aware of your duties in ordinary times: to serve as principal military advisor to the president of the United States, and to transmit the lawful orders of the president and Secretary of Defense to combatant commanders. In ordinary times, these duties are entirely consistent with your oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”
We do not live in ordinary times. The president of the United States is actively subverting our electoral system, threatening to remain in office in defiance of our Constitution. In a few months’ time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional oath. We write to assist you in thinking clearly about that choice. If Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.
That’s not actually the military’s job.
Also, let’s say that “Donald Trump refuses to leave office” what does that look like? Nothing. It looks like nothing. Biden would be sworn in. That would be it. It’s not like the President is just the guy who hits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Trump would have no Constitutional authority to do anything and would get escorted out of the building by White House security.
The idea that he could just stay in the White House and give orders that anybody would be obligated to follow is do detached from reality that it’s shocking anyone would believe it. Except that these two college-educated Army officers believe it.
But I digress…
Due to a dangerous confluence of circumstances, the once-unthinkable scenario of authoritarian rule in the United States is now a very real possibility.
No, no it’s not. At least not from Trump it’s not.
Mr. Trump is assembling a private army capable of thwarting not only the will of the electorate but also the capacities of ordinary law enforcement. When these forces collide on January 20, 2021, the U.S. military will be the only institution capable of upholding our Constitutional order.
A private army? Really? Where? How is this happening under our noses and nobody is noticing? How does someone get in on that action and get an M249 or M240? Asking for a friend.
Given this dizzying array of threats not merely to his political prospects, but also his liberty and wealth, Mr. Trump is following the playbook of dictators throughout history: he is building a private army answerable only to him. When Caesar faced the prospect of a trial in Rome, he did not return to face his day in court. He unleashed an army personally loyal to him alone on the Roman government. No student of history, Mr. Trump nevertheless appears to be following Caesar’s example. The president’s use of militarized Homeland Security agents against domestic political demonstrations constitutes the creation of a paramilitary force unaccountable to the public. The members of this private army, often lacking police insignia or other identification, exist not to enforce the law but to intimidate the president’s political opponents.
This is bullshit. The US Marshall Service, INS, and BORTAC, are not Trump’s private army. They are federal law enforcement agencies that were tasked – within the limitations of their duties – to enforce federal law and protect federal property from destruction. They were not going door to door shooting or disappearing innocent people just for indicating that they were not going to vote for Trump.
A private army would be an army that Trump funds with his own money, like Blackwater or Executive Outcomes. Not sworn federal officers who graduated from FLETC and collect US government paychecks.
Also, they did not lack police insignia. They lacked name tapes to prevent them from being doxxed. They wore badges and police ID.
This is paranoid insanity that has nothing to do with reality.
Mr. Trump may refuse to leave office. He would likely offer as a fig leaf of legitimacy the shopworn lies about election fraud. Mr. Trump’s acolytes in right-wing media will certainly rush to repeat and amplify these lies, manufacturing sufficient evidence to provide a pretext of plausibility. America’s greatest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War will come about by a president who simply refuses to leave office.
No, it really won’t. The winner of the electoral college will be sworn in at 12:01 on January 20th, 2021. It’s that simple.
The Democrat-led House of Representatives will certify the Electoral College results, which Mr. Trump will dismiss as fake news. The courts, flooded with cases from both Democrats and Mr. Trump’s legal team, will take months working through the docket, producing reasoned rulings that Trump will alternately appeal and ignore.
The Supreme Court will make a decision before then. If for some reason they can’t the Presidency will automatically revert to the Speaker of the House who would be sworn in on January 3rd.
Then the clock will strike 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021, and Donald Trump will be sitting in the Oval Office. The street protests will inevitably swell outside the White House, and the ranks of Trump’s private army will grow inside its grounds. The speaker of the House will declare the Trump presidency at an end, and direct the Secret Service and Federal Marshals to remove Trump from the premises. These agents will realize that they are outmanned and outgunned by Trump’s private army, and the moment of decision will arrive.
This is the point where this turns dark. You can just hear the salivation at the idea of the US military being unleashed to murder the fuck out of Trump supporters.
Sure, these same people pissed and moaned about rioters who were attacking federal officers and destroying federal property hit with rubber bullets and tear gas. But when it comes time to open fire with live ammo on Trump supporters they cannot control their hardons.
U.S. military forces escort the former president from the White House grounds. Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne.
These two guys are masturbating to the fantasy of the 82nd killing US citizens. Just taking turns sucking each other off while the other dirty-talks a Tiananmen Square like massacre of guys in MAGA.
As the senior military officer of the United States, the choice between these two options lies with you. In the Constitutional crisis described above, your duty is to give unambiguous orders directing U.S. military forces to support the Constitutional transfer of power. Should you remain silent, you will be complicit in a coup d’état.
If at 12:02, the US military isn’t ending in the SEALs to get Trump like they did Osama Bin Laden and having the 82nd Airborne gun down MAGA hats, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a traitor.
You were rightly criticized for your prior active complicity in the president’s use of force against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. Your passive complicity in an extralegal seizure of political power would be far worse.
Peaceful protesters who burned a church and threatened the White House.
Notice the double standard. Tear gassing Leftist rioters is bad. Shooting MAGA hats is good.
The fate of our Republic may well depend upon your adherence to this oath. [Defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.]
Respectfully yours,
John Nagl and Paul Yingling
Trump and his supporters are domestic enemies Their minds are already made up.
These two guys attached their names to this shit. If they were just asshole pundits for MSNBC it would be one thing, but these guys are both retired US Army officers. If they exist you know there are more in the military that believe this too.
We literally have US Army officers who get excited at the idea of staging a tactical operation against a US President and his supporters.
You know that given the opportunity they would jump at this.
The mask has come off. There are members of the US military brass who are partisan hacks who consider their fellow citizens to be enemy combatants.
This should scare the shit out of you.
It makes me wonder where this kind and amount of mental masturbation comes from.
Do they not see there’s an active coup going on right now, following the “bottom up, top down” methods the communists have used since the 50s? Do they not see they’re more likely going to be needed to stop those attacks on their country? Or do they not care and want their country to fall?
Or do they not care and want their country to fall?
The problem isn’t that they don’t care; it’s that TDS makes them care much more deeply than they should. If the country falls but takes Trump with it, it’s a worthy sacrifice.
If the country falls and Trump still stands, they will wail and gnash teeth, but decide it was worth the attempt, and we’ll try again later with the rest of the Western world, and again with the whole world if necessary. Trump must fall, and no cost is too great.
That’s the part that scares the hell out of me. Not that they want Trump to fall — a minority of people wanting the sitting Executive to fall is as old as civilization — but that they will willingly destroy everything as a sacrifice to see it happen.
The repeated use of Mr. Trump vs Mr. President or President Trump is a primary indicator of childish refusal of facts but watch how it suddenly becomes a ‘racist dog whistle’ the next time a Democrat gets elected.
If I had to do eight years of saying ‘the honorable Barrack Hus-oh sorry we’re not supposed to say his middle name-Obama” with a straight face they can suck it up and treat the office with a little class.
I was raised to respect the office, even if you don’t like the man who holds it. And the Democrats were constantly saying that same thing to conservatives during the Obama years.
Funny how when the shoe’s on the other foot, they immediately do the same thing. Also funny is how much more they HATE being called out for it than conservatives ever did.
My response to the “Not My President” movement has evolved to, “Yes, he is; he’s America’s President. He’s your President, too, unless you renounced your citizenship since we last spoke, and if that’s the case, get the hell out of my country.”
All this tells me is that when- not if- the Dems come into power, they will be the ones with private armies.
Always accuse your enemies of your actions. They’ve been doing this for years.
It’s easy to see this is an amazing piece of marxist propaganda perpetrated by some alleged former military people.
All you need to do is notice the phrase “The president of the United States is actively subverting our electoral system…”, a piece of utter fiction that sets the tone for all that follows.
I read an article last week about how the Democrats were “wargaming” scenarios if Trump wins, one of them involved secession and civil war. At first I thought it impossible, as the military would side with the elected President (Trump). Then I read this and I’m also reminded of other popular retired officers who have beclowned themselves with anti Trump diatribes (Mattis) and it dawns on me that the Democrats/Communists would likely get plenty of support from our military. Since the soft coup they have tried is falling apart, it’s no stretch to imagine a legit, Communist, 3rd world military coup, led by traitors, is entirely possible.
For another data point, look at the campaign material for Jake Auchincloss, D candidate for Joe Kennedy’s seat in MA. He says he’s a former Marine captain, and he advocates stuff like gun confiscations, abolishing concealed carry (it doesn’t appear he intends open carry to be the replacement), among other extreme positions. Sadly, given where he’s running, it’s conceivable he might win the primary which would just about give him the seat in one-party MA.
Matthew Bracken (in his Anthology, a piece named “When the music stops”) writes about a similar piece of military masturbation by Col. Kevin Benson. It turns out the article he references is online: https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/full-spectrum-operations-in-the-homeland-a-“vision”-of-the-future
It’s called Antifa. Their dining fund it.
I think I covered him a little bit ago.
Now we know the reason they are retired as leutenant colonels, pure stupidity
@Archer:
Yes, they’re willing to destroy everything THAT IS because then they can create the Socialist Utopia. This is a FAITH for them.
And to achieve this we need to be eliminated. They’ve been preparing for this ideologically and culturally:
http://redpilljew.blogspot.com/2020/06/stream-of-consciousness-fertilizing.html
@pkoning
They’re laying the groundwork for a messy 2020 election. So let’s suppose there’s REAL messes, but in the end Trump wins. Wow, handy excuse for them to spend another four years denying Trump.