Progressives like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are bound and determined to turn up white extremists in the US military. But like big foot, the Loch Ness monster, and the black-footed ferret, the military white extremist is illusive. So, rare, in fact, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) told the Department of Defense to stop looking for the scarce life form. But don’t tell that to Senator Schumer, who believes a white extremist is behind every rock and blames Republican lawmakers for condoning white extremists among the troops. GOP legislators are doing a poor job, if that is true.
Congress Says Stop Looking for Extremists Among the Troops
In its Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the SASC considered the number of potential white supremacists in the US military to be so small it gave instruction to discontinue the search for such bad actors, presumably because a second such report would prove embarrassing to those who make headlines from the supremacist rhetoric. There is more evidence the scourge of white supremacists, white extremists, or white nationalists in the military may be overblown. Under the category of “domestic terrorism,” if you go to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) webpage identifying the “Most Wanted,” and filter on any of the “white” adjectives above there are precisely zero hits. If individuals with “white” before their political points of view were so socially odious, you’d think they might make the FBI’s list. There is not one white nationalist, extremist, or supremacist on the Ten Most Wanted. Congress was right to direct the Department of Defense to concentrate on more critical matters. As the FY2023 NDAA explains:
“In a force of 2.1 million active and reserve personnel, this is a case rate of .005 percent, one servicemember out of every 21,000…the case incident rate does not warrant a Department-wide effort on the issue… to combat exceptionally rare instances of extremism in the military is an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds and should be discontinued by the Department of Defense immediately.”
However, the low, almost imperceptible, incidence of white extremist behavior does not stop media reports from pushing the fear-mongering narrative. One such Military Times article, titled “Dems accuse GOP lawmaker of condoning white supremacy among troops,” warns:
“Supporters of the Defense Department training and the broader anti-extremism efforts point to recurring issues of violent ideology among individuals linked to [not in] the military. For example, in the eight months following the mandated stand-down [for anti-extremist training], defense officials reported 100 cases of service members engaging in prohibited acts of extremism…”
The precise statement taken from the December 2021 Report on Countering Extremist Activity Within the Department of Defense, to which the Military Times refers and the FY2023 NDAA alluded, is: “substantiated matters of members of the military who are subject to official action due to engagement in prohibited extremist activity are fewer than 100 over the past year.” Not 100, but “fewer than” 100, the report states. That could be any number between zero and 99. It may be a minor point, but it is an example of the media pushing Schumer’s narrative.
Extremists, Nationalists, and MAGA Americans Conflated
The Senate majority leader buckets all former President Donald Trump supporters as white nationalists, easily conflated with white extremists and supremacists, as the Military Times article does. “The Democrats characterize all MAGA Republicans in the military as white nationalists. Wrong. OK? We can’t get politics in the military. This has nothing to do with extremists and all that…The military is about somebody that is fighting for the security of all of us,” Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Julie Tsirkin of NBC News.
You can see where this is going, right? If someone is in the conservative, MAGA, pro-Trump camp, they are, therefore, a white nationalist, white extremist, or white supremacists. However, we can’t be sure whether black Americans who support former President Trump or conservative values, generally, can be categorized as “white nationalists.” What we can legitimately surmise is there may be a lot of MAGA Americans among the troops, but not so many extremists. The white extremist remains an elusive and rare creature within the US Armed Forces.
