We explore necessary government institutions such as the Army, the FBI and the IRS to see the challenges they face today, and possible fixes.
We explore necessary government institutions such as the Army, the FBI and the IRS to see the challenges they face today, and possible fixes.
The Rot of Our Institutions – Part Four
Life and Liberty
February 2024
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
George Orwell
And now two quotes from John F Kennedy, both in regard to the FBI.
“Here’s what I believe, I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in the history of the world but i think there was some bad apples over there.”
“Ninety-nine percent of the men and women of the FBI... are just professionals. I don’t want Americans, if an FBI agent knocks on their door, to have to be worried about, well, is he a Democrat or a Republican? He’s an FBI agent.”
I will touch on three governmental entities here, institutions that have been corrupted, but all are necessary to the functioning and survival of our Republic. I will start with the Army.
In 1981, the United States Army launched an iconic recruiting market effort. “Be All You Can Be” was a tagline that resonated so well and was so effective that it lasted for over 20 years and even recently has been resuscitated. Of the campaign, the Army Historical Foundation states,
After coming up 16,000 men short in 1979, US Army Recruitment had made its 1980 recruiting mission. But only an unsatisfactory fifty-four percent of the enlistees were High School Diploma Graduates (HSDG) with “upper half” test scores. The Army could no longer afford the high first-term attrition experienced by high school dropouts, and recruits had to be smart enough to handle the more demanding training required for many Military Occupational Specialties.
William D. Tyler, writing in Advertising Age, cited the universal appeal of Be All You Can Be, saying it hit a psychological bulls-eye, appealing to the dropout and the high school graduate.
In the 1970s, Be All You Can Be replaced the less inspiring “Today’s Army Wants You.” Note the focus of these campaigns, with the earlier one focused on the Army but the 2nd on an individual.
After a 20-year run, Be All You Can Be was replaced in 2001. The Army then went full-on singular, adopting the “Army of One” slogan after research showed that young people saw life in the military as dehumanizing. And, of course, the concept of an “army of one” is ridiculous. Since ancient times, the essential line between following and rejecting bad orders has plagued militaries.
The Romans were incredibly successful because their armies operated like gigantic machines. Their opponents, including other Latins, Greeks, Gauls, Carthaginians, Seleucids, and Egyptians, operated with distinct units. And we know who ended up winning. And like us, the Romans were not entirely subject to people like the Egyptians. Gaius Julius Caesar was killed because a group of Romans disliked taking orders from him despite his obvious talents and successes. I am a great believer in individual agency. I despise that progressives want to tell me what car I can drive, what I can eat, or how I can prepare that food.
Even today, I just read that Washington State wants to ban certain tires based on, you guessed it, climate change. But my desire and belief system are more doctrinaire than it sounds. I have worked for eight different businesses in my career, and at each of them, there was a moment when a boss would give me an order, and I was expected to carry it out. Of course, they never asked me to do anything illegal, or immoral for that matter, or I would have quit. It is trickier with an army. If an officer says fire artillery at that village because he believes there are enemy troops, and you feel there are civilians, you still have to fire that artillery. You can provide your thoughts; we are not robots, but if he is adamant, you must do so. Many on the left and perhaps some libertarians will say this is the beginning of tyranny. It is how an army must ultimately conduct itself. I have noted that the movie A Few Good Men has not changed in 25 years. But I have.
A twenty-something AD identified with Tom Cruise’s Daniel Caffey. In my 30s, it was with Kevin Pollack’s Lieutenant Weinberg, but at my current age, I find Demi Moore’s Lieutenant Colonel Galloway was right and, alarmingly, see the wisdom of Colonel Jessup. Of course, ordering the code red was wrong without understanding the physical condition of private Santiago. In many regards, the movie’s real villain was the smug doctor. But it was also Jessup denying he had ordered the code red. We live under his protection and then question the manner in which he provides it indeed. Colonel Jessup was, in my opinion, not a good officer for many reasons, but he was not massacring civilians.
We are allocated three natural rights in the Declaration: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and inherent in the first two is the need for a robust, strong, and aggressive military. I say aggressive because Homo sapiens is a particularly murderous and conniving animal. Often, it is not an army’s ability to do violence but the fear of violence that exists as a deterrence. The Army is not a youth corp., a vocational school, an indoctrination center, or a therapist. There might be elements of these things present in its training, but they exist to harm. This means that the people staffing an army must be fit, well-trained, extremely disciplined, and not afraid to inflict harm. I am not saying they should willingly desire such an end but rather be prepared for the eventuality of homicide.
So, seeing something as ludicrous as this from the very top of the Army is disheartening. Former Chief of Staff Mark Milley defended the study of critical race theory in the military when pressed on the issue before the House Armed Services Committee, saying he wanted to “understand white rage.” Milley also noted that ‘I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” during his testimony. Now, I am the first to note that Congress’ latest style of bringing in people to testify only to lecture the witnesses or use them as props to drum up campaign YouTube videos is gross. But to be so flippant to what the overseers of government are is also grotesque.
And no, studying Lenin does not make one a communist, but I am not sure it makes one a proficient officer in the Army. I am pretty confident that learning about white rage does not, either.
As I have stated several times, the core of CRT is to note that systems of power are based on a single thing: race. And under this theory, if you are white, you have systemic power; a minority, not so much. Aside from the very racist conjecture of this premise, we are not talking about a university or even a political debating society. CRT is about division and, therefore, inherently divisive, and divisiveness within a military is fatal. I am not talking about disagreements over whether aircraft carriers are still effective weapons or whether we should deploy more troops in the Middle East. Those arguments are within the purview of a military. But CRT? Does the Army wish to fan racial flames in a military intentionally?
Today’s military is composed as follows: Whites: 54%, Blacks: 20%, Hispanics: 18%, Asian or Pacific Islanders: 7%. Do we want to create divisions within these groups purposely?
There should only be one set of colors within the US military: the colors of the uniforms worn by the service members.
As for studying Lenin, life is not about time but priorities. Given all of the priorities inherent within the mission of an army, why would it devote itself to white rage, or Lenin, for that matter?
How about this for reading:
· Mastery of Annual Training Guidance or ATG
· Prioritizing mission-essential tasks, weapons qualification, and collective live-fire tasks.
· The delineation between evaluations based on approved standards, and the assessments commanders render.
These items are taken directly from the Army Training Manual, and its introduction states its goal better than I have so far:
Winning matters! There is no second place or honorable mention in combat. We win by developing cohesive teams that are highly trained, disciplined, and fit. We win by doing the right things the right way. We win through our people. FM 7-0, Training, describes how the Army trains our people to compete, fight, and win because the best fighting forces in the world ensure their small units and individuals are masters of their craft.
I should note that this manual is over 100 pages long and would take months, if not years, to master. Priorities.
We fight them here, or we fight them there, and there is a particularly nasty reality that to fight effectively, there are times when people need to sacrifice their individuality. When an army orders a unit into a rearguard action, which might save the rest of the Army, that unit cannot say, but can’t the other guys do it? They will think about it, but they cannot.
Now, I do not want to be over the top on this. Woke content will not make a difference between victory and defeat, but I cannot conceive of where it would help. I said the same thing when former President Obama repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. To be clear, I am supportive of gays serving in the military, but my concern then, and now, is that the military is not the right platform for espousing gay rights any more than it should be a place for the activism of CRT. The only activism that should concern the military is those activities that make it a more efficient organization. No gay or straight, no black or white. Soldiers. I realize this is an ideal, but in striving for the perfect, excellence can occur.
In addition to the new tagline. Something else happened in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan became president and began to remove the malaise that existed over the military put there by the Vietnam War. By the end of his 2nd term, the Army had regained its élan, its fighting capability, not just because of the money Reagan spent or a clever catchphrase but by renewing the focus of what the Army was for and why it was there to defend us. The introduction of CRT, which by its nature is a condemnation of our system, muddies that goal.
And like the 1970s, the Army once again has a severe recruiting problem. According to Rafi Schwarz writing in This Week, “Now, more than a half-century later, the country’s all-volunteer force has reached a crisis point; 2022 was the Army’s worst recruiting year since the end of the draft in 1973, missing its goal of 60,000 new soldiers by approximately 25 percent. Other military branches have experienced similar shortfalls — a trend that’s fueled the growing question of whether the Pentagon’s recruitment difficulties are a reversible problem or a permanent feature of the 21st century.”
And this is not just typical Americans eschewing life in the military, but even veteran families, long a source of new soldiers, taking a different tack. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ben Kesling states,
Sky Nisperos’s grandfather came to the US from Mexico and became an American citizen by serving in the US Navy. Her father, Ernest Nisperos, is an active-duty officer in the Air Force with two decades of service. For years, Sky planned to follow a similar path. “I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” the 22-year-old said. “It was stuck in my head.”
Now, one of the most influential people in her life—her father—is telling her that a military career may not be the right thing. The children of military families make up the majority of new recruits in the US military. That pipeline is now under threat, which is terrible news for the Pentagon’s already acute recruitment problems, as well as America’s military readiness.
And there are limits to who they can actually recruit. “The Department of Defense said 77% of American youth are disqualified from military service due to a lack of physical fitness, low test scores, criminal records including drug use or other problems. In 2013, about 71% of youth were ineligible.” And in a recent change, “One early lesson: The Cold War-era slogan, “Be All You Can Be,” performed better than a recent one, “Army of One,” which didn’t reflect the teamwork the service thinks appeals to current teenagers. The slogan also emphasizes that the military offers career development and a broader sense of purpose, some of its strongest selling points.” These are all promising approaches; note what is not in that recipe.
I will pivot briefly to another critical institution to that “life and liberty” aspect of the Declaration’s province, the FBI.
Our priority is to help protect you, your children, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation—from international and domestic terrorists to spies on US soil, from cyber villains to corrupt government officials, from mobsters to violent street gangs, from child predators to serial killers. Along the way, we help defend and uphold our nation’s economy, physical and electronic infrastructure, and democracy.
This is really about policing, with the massive caveat that a Chicago Police officer cannot investigate things going on in Indiana or Wisconsin or even Peoria, for that matter, but the FBI can. The issue is the purview of the FBI: The FBI’s investigative programs include counterterrorism, counterintelligence, cyber, public corruption, civil rights, transnational organized crime, white-collar crime, violent crime, and weapons of mass destruction.
They bury it within their purview, but one of their items is public corruption, and therein lay all of the issues with the bureau. Violent crime is apparent, and so are weapons of mass destruction. But in recent years, and especially in the guise of former Director James Comey, the role of prevention of public corruption has become so vague as to include things way. Somewhere along the line, Comey, in 2016, felt that Donald Trump’s candidacy was crossing that line of corruption. It is the only way to explain that, ten days before the presidential election of that year, Comey would intervene in the election by noting that Hillary Clinton was exonerated of any charges of mishandling documents related to emails. Clinton had kept a personal server, against regulations, and had classified documents on that server. However, Comey did not think there was enough evidence for an indictment and publicly stated as much.
Now, Comey may have been a genius in navigating FBI bureaucracy, but he demonstrated an unbelievable idiocy in his intervention if his intention was to prevent the election of Trump. First, voters, and most people, tend to remember the latest statement on a subject, and Comey’s statement, ten days before the election, reminded voters of all the baggage carried by Hillary Clinton. And the thought of an FBI Director’s unilateral decision directly affecting the result of a presidential election is alarming. My reform is to separate the FBI’s necessary work in terms of violent crime or bank robbing from the political item of public corruption. A separate unit within the FBI that also needs Congressional approval.
And finally, to the IRS. The necessity of the first two is obvious. This third one? Maybe, but thinking someone has to collect the taxes. But the IRS does more; they also determine tax status, though that should be clearly laid out in a bill from Congress, another neglected duty on the part of the supine body. Without that guidance, even the left-of-center NPR noticed the issue, “In 2013, IRS official Lois Lerner revealed that conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status had been getting extra scrutiny, based on words such as “tea party” or “patriots” in their names.
For conservatives, she confirmed their darkest suspicions. In the Tea Party heyday years of 2009 and 2010, hundreds of groups affiliated with the party had sought tax-exempt status as 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations. IRS demands for documents left many of them in bureaucratic limbo for a year or more.
Writing in 2018, Bradley A. Smith of the Wall Street Journal stated that while some of the faces of the IRS have changed, the law that enabled their misuse of power has not. Congress’s failure to address the problem leaves the US democratic process vulnerable to further abuses.
Lois Lerner, the career official at the center of the IRS scandal, retired on full pension after invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before Congress. John Koskinen, appointed IRS commissioner by Mr. Obama to lead the agency “in difficult times,” served his full term, spending the better part of four years stonewalling congressional requests for information. On his watch, the IRS destroyed evidence subject to subpoena. After initially expressing shock, Mr. Obama abandoned any pretext of interest, suggesting it was a “phony scandal.” And why not? A 2012 American Enterprise Institute study found that tea-party organizations substantially increased conservative turnout in the 2010 midterms. The agency’s suppression of those groups in the following years might have boosted Mr. Obama’s re-election.
It is a little rich that the party that in 2024 screams about threats to democracy was the first to use election results denial as a political mainstay and corrupted the IRS in favor of their preferred donors. Lately, Congress has enacted laws to hire tens of thousands more agents. We have the most progressive tax system in the industrialized world. So why hire all of those new agents? Because of the lust for tax revenue inherent to sustain the left’s never-ending appetite for more governmental power enabled by those taxes.
I am the first one to say that most governments are bad governments. We have rules and regulations in which one group of politicians are trying to tell Americans what they can eat, what they can drive, how to heat their homes, and even how to raise their children. These should all be left to the individual decisions of Americans. But we need an army in terms of physical protection from foreign foes. From the actions of our own citizens, we need police forces, including one that can operate across local and state jurisdictions, and to pay for the first two, we require a tax collection agency. The need is the operative word, and in the examples I have described above, the overweening desire of the left to politicize everything has already been to the detriment of these necessary institutions.
In his book America’s Cultural Reckoning, Christopher Rufo spends much time on where this rot began. He also notes, “The capture of the universities, more than anything, represents a model for the future. The critical theorists and the DEI administrators believed they could manufacture the new set of values through the academic departments and perpetuate them through the bureaucracy. He adds, “It was only a matter of time before it sought to extend beyond the campus gates. I agree with what Rufo is saying but disagree about the timing. It is well out of the campus gates leftist ideology, especially in the guise of DEI, has permeated all of our institutions.
Rufo notes that the great weakness of the cultural revolution, his catch-all phrase, is that it “negates the metaphysic, morality, and stability of the common citizen.”
He adds, “This will not be class vs class but rather between the citizens and the ideological regime.”
If there is a recurring theme to my last four podcasts, it is that all of these necessary institutions have gone beyond their mission. Johann von Goethe: “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” He was talking about priorities, but what if the priority is to hijack the organizations and rechanneled its focus towards progressive ideologies? Then, it will fail in its mission. We have explored our education, healthcare system, freedom of speech, and the protection of our nation and ourselves. At the heart of all these things are institutions that must refocus and then be preserved. The fate of our Republic depends on this.