Commentary
This week’s deeply unsettling revelation of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s alleged late Trump administration-era perfidy, bordering on high treason, is but one glaring fusillade in a years-long crusade by America’s decrepit ruling class to condemn and ultimately subjugate us “deplorables,” “wrong-thinkers” and all others with a conservative or traditionalist worldview. It is a shot across the bow in that roiling cold domestic conflict, and a clarion call as to the relevant stakes. It is also a brazen assault on one of the most rudimentary defining features of America’s constitutional order—an assault that exposes the lie that the ruling class and its left-wing echo chamber denizens care one whit about the very “democracy” they invariably claim to cherish.
To recap, a leak of a forthcoming book from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, “Peril,” claims that two days after the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot, Milley was so bothered by former President Donald Trump’s demeanor and conduct that he deemed it necessary to take unilateral action outside the formal chain of command. Specifically, Milley allegedly convened a rogue meeting with senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s de facto war room, to tell them not to accept military orders from anyone unless he was personally involved.
In effect, Milley, haunted by hysterical cable news-induced nightmares and caving to delusions of grandeur, took impetuous action to cut out the commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces himself from the formal chain of command. He did so, we are made to believe, out of fear the lame-duck president might launch a high-scale attack or nuclear weapon strike, perhaps against China.
Although the qualifier “allegedly” is perhaps strictly necessary to describe Milley’s actions, it is worth noting that Milley’s office responded to the leak by issuing a nonapology “apology.” Milley’s “calls with the Chinese and others in October and January were in keeping with (his) duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability,” the response statement from spokesperson Col. Dave Butler read.
There was, in short, no denial, which all but assuredly means the allegations from “Peril” are true. And since the statement, President Joe Biden has resisted manifold calls for Milley’s resignation, including one from Milley’s former boss, former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, and even one from the notorious anti-Trump former National Security Council staffer Alexander Vindman. He has instead pledged that he has “great confidence” in Milley.
There could not possibly be a clearer example of how much the American ruling class is drunk on power and of how little it cares for any and all obstacles standing in the way of its accumulation and exercise of that power.
It also just so happens that, in this instance, those obstacles take the form of the quintessential defining feature of what usually separates a democracy or a republican form of governance from a dictatorship: ultimate civilian control of the military. In undermining that ultimate civilian control, Milley and his apologists are playing with fire. How bitterly ironic, too, that the same left-wingers who opposed Trump on ostensibly “fascist” or “authoritarian” grounds while simultaneously preaching about the imperative to save our American “democracy” are now the ones who, seemingly without fail, have taken to defending a Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who has taken a blowtorch to the very definition of “democracy.”
Milley is, of course, the same man who has openly defended the merits of studying critical race theory in the military and, in general, seems far more preoccupied with preening for holier-than-thou wokesters than he does with ensuring the U.S. Armed Forces are adequately prepared to hunt down and kill America’s enemies in the most efficient way possible. In short, as National Review’s Dan McLaughlin tweeted: “To Mark Milley, the General Lee who has been dead for 151 years is a dire threat, but the General Li who commands the world’s largest army on behalf of a murderous tyranny is a chum.” That is damning almost beyond words.
Milley’s direct attack on civilian control of the military is but the latest indication that our wokeist ruling class will take no prisoners in its systemic assault upon the very pillars of the American constitutional order. From Trump-era “deep state” malfeasance to imperious progressive judging to a woke Joint Chiefs chairman feeling justified in removing the duly elected commander in chief from the military chain of command, the ruling class has now thoroughly revealed the depths to which it is willing to sink in order to enact its agenda and force its political opposition to bend the knee. Eyes wide open, the onus is now on the deplorables to resist such an anti-constitutional—indeed, anti-American—trampling.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
