Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Ordered a stand down of the armed services over the next 60 days to give military leaders the time to address extremism in the ranks. This directive comes as a direct result of the Capitol Riot. The Pentagon was stunned to find out that veterans and active-duty service members had taken part in the riot.
During this stand down, military leaders are to talk to the service men and women about extremism. Service members will have break from their regular activities to attend meetings and events to discuss extremism in the military. One of the problems they have found is that there is no concrete definition for extremism and there is no policy on policing service members' social media accounts as there are 1st Amendment ramifications there.
My two cents
I tweeted right after the Capitol riots that anyone in the service that is a Trump Supporter should be given early retirement and full benefits. I also said that they should be barred from any government jobs or any other affiliation with the military. I still feel this way and after reading this article I am glad that the Austin is looking into way to combat extremism in the military ranks but the truth of the matter is that these people show themselves all day everyday on social media.
These people were on social media talking about a race war coming, they talked about Biden not being their president, and a number of other things that were red flags. My dad was in the military for 30 years and not once did he ever mention his political leanings until after he got out of the military because no matter who the president was my dad would have to follow orders given by him because he is the Commander-in-Chief.
I was actually talking to my brother the other day because he was in one of these meetings and we were saying that the only reason everyone has to participate is because they don't want the ones who need to take all those sensitivity training classes and talking about extremism would feel like they are being targeted which would 100% be the case.
Earlier I mentioned that they said there wasn't a concrete definition of extremism which is what makes it hard for them to root it out in the military but the truth is that if someone had been monitoring their social media accounts they would have been able to see all of the people who were likely to succumb to extremist logic-- hell, at the very least they would have been able to find all the people who have racist tendencies.
I know they talk about freedom of speech, but when you're in the military on social media RT'ing stuff that says "Biden is never going to be my president" or videos of people talking about race wars that's not freedom of speech; that's a tendency and it needs to be evaluated especially when you are training these soldiers to be effective tools of war.
In the end, I am not saying they need to be monitoring for everything but they need to have people watching the trends and habits of their service members. They need to have a reporting system in place as well and that way when a post gets flagged on a social media site and the person is a known service member someone can investigate. Lastly they need to stop acting like they haven't defined extremism and the groups that promote violence and terror. We all know what a racist sounds like, we all know what a homophobic person sounds like, we all know what hate speech sounds like and we need to stop acting like just because these QAnon people are American that they aren't terrorists. Their whole game plan was to storm the Capitol to instill fear plain and simple. Once we acknowledge that fact then maybe the definition of extremism will become a lot more clear.
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