New Year’s Day attacks by US service members highlight threat, says Bishop Garrison who led DoD investigation

Summary

Bishop Garrison, a former Pentagon official who led a 2021 investigation into military extremism, warns that recent New Year’s Day attacks by military personnel highlight the ongoing threat of radicalization and distress in the armed forces.

Despite a report recommending counter-extremism measures, its policies were never implemented, facing backlash from right-wing figures, including Trump’s defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth.

As Hegseth aims to dismantle counter-extremism programs, Garrison stresses the risks of neglecting the issue, citing cultural and mental health challenges within the military.

  • Chainweasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Every service member I personally know is pretty open about it, it doesn’t seem very asleep to me

    • horse_battery_staple@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 month ago

      I was attached to MARSOC early on when they were forming the groups and recruiting from Raiders and Force Recon. I was usually attached when they needed to plus up for DMRs. Being 0317 gave me a lot of job opportunities in the early GWOT.

      Anyways, we would often deploy in joint efforts with the Green Beret ODAs and almost always it was the tertiary POGs that were the most gung ho assholes. They’d always let you know how smart they were and how stupid the government was for letting all the fat purple hairs into the general ranks. This guy was the POGest of POGs as he was a glorified drone operator. I have doubts he ever left the FOB.

      SOF/SF tier one units are filled with embezzling wife beaters who deal fent. I’ve rubbed shoulders with plenty of them. Plenty of them who rotate back to civ div end up robbing banks and selling their training services to militias. It’s the perfect setup for domestic terrorism.

      Excerpt from another thread on the Tesla Truck bomber

  • seven_phone@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    Extremism is born from the real sleeping danger of poor education and information standards which allow people to latch onto and be swayed by simplistic nonsense touted all too loudly on social media. When the rest of the world wore masks to protect the person next to them a loud section of the US population believed it was a plot to turn them Muslim. Similarly when the world understood the value of the developed vaccines a large part of the US thought it was a plot to implant tracking microchips - while carrying phones that were actually capable of tracking their activity. Every country has factions of this sort and the American population might have more reason than most to suspect government instructed mass vaccination programs but for a country with so much wealth the USA seems particularly prone to the sort of demagoguery that can take root in a poorly informed population. To put it more succinctly every day the film Idiocracy gets a little less funny.

  • SoftTeeth@lemmy.world
    01·
    1 month ago

    The only bad extremism is right wing authoritarianism.

    Left wing extremism = the civil rights movement