It’s a shocking story.
Imagine you complain on Facebook about your child’s school curriculum. You then get some feedback:
An army officer calls you an “extremist” and writes that military “leadership have had the Security Forces working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor” your situation.
Sure enough, the local police chief then pressures you to delete your social media post.
You might wonder if the scene of this incident, which did occur, was China or Russia. Except for one thing: Your complaint was about your 7-year-old daughter being exposed to “pansexuality,” something that, for all of Beijing’s and Moscow’s faults, you’d never find in their schools.
In fact, this happened in these United States of America.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported on this shocking story yesterday evening, relating that “a few days ago, a mother in New Jersey … Angela Reading, found out her child’s elementary school was advertising something called pansexuality … so she complained about it on Facebook.… Out of the blue an army officer … called Angela Reading an extremist on Facebook.”
The soldier’s name is Lt. Col. Christopher Schilling, stationed at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. He wasn’t done with Reading, either. For he then wrote on Facebook the following:
“Joint base leadership … have had the Security Forces working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor the situation.”
This sounds hard to believe, but it has been verified after first being reported at the Chaos and Control Substack blog.
Speaking for many, Carlson was shocked. “What?!” he stated. “So the military responded to a mom in an elementary school complaining about the sexualization of her own child? That warranted a military response under Joe Biden?” But it gets worse still.
On this military interference’s heels, North Hanover, N.J., police chief Robert Duff pressured Reading to delete her Facebook post. “Let that sink in,” Carlson stated, before continuing:
The police and the military got involved because a mom wrote something on Facebook they didn’t like. Today Joint Base M.D.L. confirmed to the show that they notified law enforcement of the social media exchange, which is common information sharing practice among law enforcement agencies.
Except wait a second, a military base is not a “law enforcement agency.” The purpose of the military is to defend us from foreign enemies, not police our Facebook posts. This is mind-boggling, and we pray someone does something about it. [Video below, which includes a full interview with Reading.]
So here’s the situation: Some of the same people who are aghast at the idea of having our military secure our sieve-like, open border — and who recoiled at the prospect of President Trump using National Guard troops to quell 2020’s 600-plus violent left-wing, nation-rending riots — will turn around and tolerate or even endorse a military man’s using of his position to intimidate a mother into silence about perversion in school.
Why would Schilling get involved? Perhaps because, as the Chaos and Control blog informs, at LinkedIn the officer lists “his (he/him) pronouns, which suggests that his attack on Angela’s freedom of speech and his ‘concern for the citizens’ is politically motivated.”
Schilling, perhaps a coward as well as a woke would-be tyrant, has since deleted his LinkedIn page and changed the name on his Facebook account to “Chris Topher,” according to Chaos and Control, writing Wednesday.
Angela Reading was charitable in her interview, saying that Schilling was likely just a rogue element at his base. Perhaps. Unfortunately, though, he certainly reflects a military that has become increasingly politically correct, prioritizing killing tradition in the culture war over killing foreign enemies in a possible hot war.
This process became obvious under the Bill Clinton administration back in the 1990s, continued partially via momentum during President G.W. Bush’s two terms, accelerated aggressively when Barack Obama was in office, and now continues under Joe Biden.
The result? As The American Spectator put it last year:
For the sake of effectiveness, the military used to discriminate unapologetically in favor of the physically strongest and most capable candidates. Now that is forbidden. Exacting standards have been replaced by increasingly vague ones. Imagine how the great generals of the past would have responded if told that recruitment should turn not on military considerations but on political and sociological ones. The incorporation of transgenderism into the military is a measure of its deterioration at the hands of unserious politicians.
By fostering a nonmilitary atmosphere in the military, Biden is alienating the best soldiers and boosting the worst ones.
The military “vaccine” mandate served this end, too. After all, traditional, conservative personnel were most likely to be the ones refusing the Covid shots — and thus were the ones expelled from the armed forces, leaving it with a higher percentage of the wokeness-compliant.
Of course, part of what we’re seeing is just the military being influenced by society’s overall “leftward” drift; its members are drawn from the wider population, after all, and its policies shaped by politicians elected (insofar as they don’t win via vote fraud) by that population.
Yet a related matter is the growing lack of virtue. Military men always had opinions, but they also once knew it was their duty to, in their official capacity, remain above the political fray. But abstract qualities such as duty and honor are fanciful if not actually foreign to those weaned on our time’s prevailing relativism.
This is the price to be paid for generations of moral and philosophical corruption. For having “my own truth” can be convenient, but it’s a problem when the people with the guns and bombs and “their own truth,” too.