Say Anything Blog

An unfortunate reality that will no doubt feed further accusations from the left about our military being filled with thugs, criminals, racists and violent nut jobs.  When Obama’s Department of Homeland Security issued a memo warning about extremist soldiers his fellow liberals took it seriously.  Now it’s a meme that just won’t die.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Ala.-based watchdog group that tracks extremist hate groups, has compiled a book containing the online user profiles of at least 40 newsaxon.org users who say they are serving in the military, in apparent violation of Pentagon regulations prohibiting racist extremism in the ranks.

On Friday, the SPLC will present its findings to key members of Congress who chair the House and Senate committees overseeing the armed forces and urge them to pressure the Pentagon to crack down.

“In the wake of several high-profile murders by extremists of the radical right, we urge your committees to investigate the threat posed by racial extremists who may be serving in the military to ensure that our armed forces are not inadvertently training future domestic terrorists,” Morris Dees, SPLC co-founder and chief trial counsel, wrote to the legislators. “Evidence continues to mount that current Pentagon policies are inadequate to prevent racial extremists from joining and serving in the armed forces.”

I’ll not defend these “dozens” of racist idiots.  I have no sympathy or tolerance in my heart for hateful bigots.  That being said, there are currently over 1.4 million active duty military members.  There are another roughly 850,000 in the reserves.  “Dozens” in that group who have sympathies for neo-nazis and bigots is not exactly a crisis.  In any large group of people there are always bad apples.

And I’m a little tired of things like racism and Nazism being called “right wing.”  Certainly the oppression certain groups of people based on religion or ethnicity has nothing to do with limited government, because in order to accomplish things like that you need big government.  If anything, the oppression of certain groups of people based on cultural differences has more in common with oppressing certain groups of people based on class or finances (as the socialists want to do) than it does with the limited government movement.