White Supremacists in the Military

More than a half century after the Virginia Military Institute integrated its ranks, Black cadets still endure relentless racism at the nation’s oldest state-supported military college.

The atmosphere of hostility and cultural insensitivity makes VMI — whose cadets fought and died for the slaveholding South during the Civil War and whose leaders still celebrate that history — especially difficult for non-White students to attend, according to more than a dozen current and former students of color.

“I wake up everyday wondering, ‘Why am I still here?’ ” said William Bunton, 20, a Black senior from Portsmouth, Va.

Keniya Lee, a 2019 VMI graduate, lodged a complaint last year against a White professor who reminisced in class about her father’s Ku Klux Klan membership. The woman still teaches at the Lexington, Va., campus, which received $19 million in state funds this past fiscal year.

In 2018, a White sophomore told a Black freshman during Hell Week that he’d “lynch” his body and use his “dead corpse as a punching bag” — but was suspended instead of expelled.

In March, after a Black sophomore objected to incorporating Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s image into the design of their class ring, a fellow student denounced him by name on an anonymous chat app: “F---ing leave already. People like you are the reason this school is divided. Stop focusing so much on your skin color and focus on yourself as a person. Nobody i[n] your recent family line was oppressed by ‘muh slavery.’ ”

In September, when Vice President Pence gave a speech on campus, Bunton and another Black student boycotted the event — and were each punished with three weeks of confinement on campus, demerits and multiple hours of detention.

Now the school is under pressure from some alumni and students to remove or relocate its Confederate statues — including one of Jackson — and reconsider its long-held reverence for the Confederacy.

At VMI, Black alumni want Stonewall Jackson’s statue removed. The school refuses.

Until a few years ago, freshmen were required to salute the Jackson statue, which sits in front of the student barracks.

In a July letter to the school community, retired Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, the school’s superintendent, defended the statue of Jackson, who taught at VMI and owned six enslaved people, because he was a “military genius” and a “staunch Christian.” But Peay, who is White, also said he wanted to “erase any hint of racism at VMI” and diversify the overwhelmingly White administrative hierarchy, faculty and student body.



Peay declined a request to discuss the campus’s climate for minorities or the specific allegations of racism from students and alumni.

In a statement to The Washington Post, Peay, a 1962 VMI graduate who has been superintendent since 2003, said: “There is no place for racism or discrimination at VMI” and promised that “any allegation of racism or discrimination will be investigated and appropriately punished, if substantiated.”

He expressed puzzlement that Black students had complaints about the school’s atmosphere, saying that in the wake of the George Floyd protests, “I sought out the experiences of our alumni and tried to understand this notion that some cadets — because of the color of their skin — had a different VMI experience than others.”

About 8 percent of VMI’s 1,700 students are Black. Many are athletes who said they weren’t fully aware of the school’s history or racial climate when they accepted scholarships.

“I always felt uncomfortable and that I didn’t belong at VMI,” said Lee, who played soccer at the school and now works as a Wells Fargo global products manager in Charlotte. “My time at VMI gave me PTSD, and I haven’t healed yet.”

VMI administrators have been among those involved in racist incidents. In 2017, Col. William Wanovich, the school’s commandant of cadets, appeared in a Halloween photo of cadets dressed up in boxes as President Trump’s border wall with the words “Keep Out” and “No Cholos,” a slur against Mexicans. Wanovich, a member of the Class of 1987, didn’t return a message seeking comment. At the time, VMI said the costume was “in poor taste” and “offensive” but has since declined to reveal whether Wanovich was ever disciplined.

In March, Carmelo Echevarria Colon III, a former battalion operations and training sergeant who had been at the college since 2012, posted an insult against low-income Black people on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s Facebook page. Then, in June, he condemned the Black Lives Matter movement in another Facebook post that was screenshot and surfaced on Twitter: “I am seeing all these clowns taking a knee and bowing to [protest]. I’ll take a knee alright. To maximize my shooting platform.”

Colon, who left the school the next month, did not return messages seeking comment.

Bill Wyatt, a VMI spokesman, said that the school cannot publicly discuss personnel matters and that federal law bars the college from talking about cadet disciplinary actions. “We hold our professors to the same high standards of integrity, honor, respect and civility to which we hold our cadets,” he said.




'The best parties'

Lee was sitting in the classroom of E. Susan Kellogg, an adjunct business professor, last year when the teacher began talking about her late father, who she said belonged to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1930s.



Eventually, Lee complained to administrators, and Kellogg was asked to apologize.

“How come she couldn’t see I was uncomfortable with her bragging about the KKK who still terrorizes Black people to this day?”
Lee asked. “She couldn’t even pronounce my name right. She kept calling me Kenya.”

In an interview with The Post, Kellogg, 75, confirmed Lee’s account in her memo, with one exception: She said growing up she did not “bop” minorities, which she described as striking Blacks and other people of color with two-by-four pieces of wood. Instead, her friends did, she said.

“I was sorry she was feeling threatened because that was not the intention at all,” Kellogg said. “But I was surprised she was upset. Young people are fairly quick to make judgments. She was lacking in some perspective.”

Kellogg said she talked about her past because conversations about diversity and racism were dominating the campus, and she believed it was “important for students to understand that people change and that you can’t crucify me based on my father’s history.”

But it’s not clear if Kellogg’s late father was actually in the Klan.

“To say our father was in the KKK is an abomination. It’s complete fiction,” Kellogg’s older sister, Marilyn Smith, told The Post.
“The family doesn’t talk with her because she tells such horrendous lies.”

Kellogg told The Post that the Klan parties were a “delight to go to.” As a child, she said, she once found her father’s KKK robes.
“They smelled like firewood, and it was the nicest smell in the world,” the VMI teacher said.

'It wrecked me'

VMI was founded in 1839, and its first superintendent was Francis H. Smith, a U.S. Military Academy graduate who owned nine enslaved people on the eve of the Civil War. He thought slavery should be abolished one day — and then “Blacks should be resettled in Africa,” according to a retired VMI historian.

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Communist Dreamer said:

That was mostly a joke. Nazis still exist, but they're not in our military, and have nothing to do with Trump. They fled to the mountains of Argentina, where their descendants continue their philosophy and praise the deeds they did. The most famous of whom is Josef Mengele, and died in luxury on the beaches of Brazil.

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Roger A. Shrubber said:

only because cocksuckers like you keep the hate fresh for all of us....

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RonnieB2 said:

Racism is alive and thriving here in SC and Georgia. And its on the rise. Some folks try to play the reverse Racism card which is impossible. For a group of people to display anger and even violence is the normal reaction when backed into a corner that way. Racism is more institutional now days. Voter suppression, cops killing unarmed minorities because they look different or scare them. Its 2020 and i personally would not want to be a minority in this country

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Two U.S. Army National Guard members have been removed from the presidential inauguration security mission after they were found to have ties with right-wing militia groups, according to two U.S. Army officials. There was no threat to President-elect Joe Biden, they said.

The officials did not say which fringe group the Guard members belonged to or what unit they served in. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The removal comes as the FBI has warned law enforcement officials about the possibility that right-wing fringe groups could pose as members of the National Guard called in to help secure the city after a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters shocked the nation, according to two law enforcement officials familiar with the matter.

Washington has been on edge since the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, which has prompted extraordinary security measures ahead of Biden’s inauguration. A fire in a homeless camp roughly a mile from the Capitol complex prompted a lockdown Monday during a rehearsal for the inauguration.

U.S. Secret Service tightened security in and around the Capitol in preparation, and the city center is essentially on lockdown with streets blocked, high fencing installed and tens of thousands of National Guard troops and law enforcement officers stationed around the area.

U.S. defense officials, worried about a potential insider attack or other threat from service members involved in securing the event, pushed the FBI to vet all of the 25,000 National Guard troops coming into the area. Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said in a statement Monday that vetting of National Guard troops continues and that the Pentagon has found no intelligence so far that would indicate an insider threat.

Federal law enforcement officials have also been wary of increased surveillance of military and law enforcement checkpoints and other positions after National Guard troops reported people taking pictures and recording them, said the officials, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing security matters.

The Secret Service issued a bulletin over the weekend about what it sees as an “uptick” in National Guard troops posting pictures and details of their operations online.

The Associated Press obtained the “all concerned” message sent to all National Guard troops coming to Washington. Without getting into specific postings, the bulletin read: “No service members should be posting locations, pictures or descriptions online regarding current operations or the sensitive sites they are protecting” and urged them to stop immediately.

Asked about the bulletin, a spokesperson for the Secret Service issued a statement saying it “does not comment on matters of protective intelligence.”

Contacted by the AP Tuesday morning, the National Guard Bureau referred questions to the U.S. Secret Service and said: “Due to operational security, we do not discuss the process nor the outcome of the vetting process for military members supporting the inauguration.”

Over the summer, a man was arrested in Los Angeles for impersonating a National Guard member during protests in the city near Los Angeles City Hall. The man, Gregory Wong, was carrying a sidearm and assault rifle but was taken into custody after actual Guardsmen confronted him when they noticed things out of place on his uniform.

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NEW YORK (AP) — A U.S. Army soldier was arrested Tuesday in Georgia on terrorism charges after he spoke online about plots to blow up New York City’s 9/11 Memorial and other landmarks and attack U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, authorities said.

Cole James Bridges of Stow, Ohio, was in custody on charges of attempted material support of a terrorist organization — the Islamic State group — and attempted murder of a military member, said Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for Manhattan federal prosecutors.

The 20-year-old soldier, also known as Cole Gonzales, was with the Third Infantry Division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia, when he thought he was communicating with the Islamic State online about the terrorism plots, Biase said.

Unbeknownst to Bridges, an FBI employee was in on the chat as Bridges provided detailed instructions on tactics and manuals and advice about attacking the memorial and other targets in New York City, Biase said.

“As we allege today, Bridges, a private in the U.S. Army, betrayed our country and his unit when he plotted with someone he believed was an ISIS sympathizer to help ISIS attack and kill U.S. soldiers in the Middle East,” said William F. Sweeney Jr., head of New York City’s FBI office.

“Fortunately, the person with whom he communicated was an FBI employee, and we were able to prevent his evil desires from coming to fruition,” Sweeney said in a release.

“Our troops risk their lives for our country, but they should never face such peril at the hands of one of their own,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said.

Bridges was scheduled to make an initial appearance in federal court in Augusta, Georgia, on Thursday.

It was not immediately clear who would represent him.

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According to a criminal complaint in Manhattan federal court, Bridges joined the U.S. Army in September 2019 and was assigned as a cavalry scout in Fort Stewart.

At some point, he began researching and consuming online propaganda promoting jihadists and their violent ideology, authorities said.

They said he expressed his support for the Islamic State group and jihad on social media before he began communicating in October with an FBI employee who posed as an Islamic State group supporter in contact with the group’s fighters in the Middle East.

According to court papers, he expressed his frustration with the U.S. military and his desire to aid the Islamic State group.

The criminal complaint said he then provided training and guidance to purported Islamic State fighters who were planning attacks, including advice about potential targets in New York City, including the 9/11 Memorial.

It said he also provided portions of a U.S. Army training manual and guidance about military combat tactics.

Bridges also diagrammed specific military maneuvers to help the terrorist group’s fighters kill U.S. troops, including the best way to fortify an encampment to repel an attack by U.S. Special Forces and how to wire certain buildings with explosives to kill the U.S. troops, the complaint said.

This month, according to the complaint, Bridges sent a video of himself in body armor standing before an Islamic State flag, gesturing support.

A week later, Bridges sent a second video in which he used a voice manipulator and narrated a propaganda speech in support of the Islamic State group’s anticipated ambush of U.S. troops, the complaint said.

In a statement Tuesday, a spokesperson for the Fort Stewart-based 3rd Infantry Division, Lt. Col. Lindsey Elder, confirmed that Pfc. Cole James Bridges is assigned to the division. She said division commanders are “cooperating fully with the FBI.”

Elder referred further inquiries to the Pentagon.

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The first half of the TikTok video shows a muscular Russian man with a shaved head doing push-ups, jumping out of a plane, and staring down the scope of a rifle. The second half shows a brightly animated U.S. Army ad telling the true story of Cpl. Emma Malonelord, a soldier who enlisted after being raised by two mothers in California and graduating at the top of her high school class.

The U.S. Army said its ad showcases the “the deeply emotional and diverse” backgrounds of its soldiers. But to Sen. Ted Cruz, who retweeted the TikTok on Thursday, the contrast with Russia’s campaign instead made American soldiers “into pansies.”

“Holy crap,” Cruz said in his viral tweet. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea …”

His jab did not sit well with critics, including many former service members, veterans groups and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who is a retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel.

“Holy crap,” Duckworth tweeted Thursday, mimicking Cruz’s words. “Perhaps a U.S. Senator shouldn’t suggest that the *Russian* military is better than the American military that protected him from an insurrection he helped foment?”

In the hours after Cruz’s quip, #emasculaTED trended on Twitter.

Commander of Space Force unit fired after accusing the military of pushing an agenda ‘rooted in Marxism’

“Ted Cruz attacks a US Army soldier for telling her story, says he prefers Russians,” VoteVets, a liberal political group that advocates for veterans running for office, said in a tweet responding to Cruz. “Because Ted Cruz is a sedition-loving traitor.”

The unedited Army recruitment video also picked up steam in the last week on YouTube and Facebook, where the U.S. Army posted it on May 6. The ad shows illustrations of Malonelord growing up, marching with her moms to protest for LGBTQ rights, attending her mothers’ wedding, and, ultimately, putting on the Army uniform.

“I like to think I’ve been defending freedom from an early age,” Malonelord said in the ad.

But the original video received so much negative backlash on YouTube over the last week that the account disabled comments, the Army
Times reported Thursday.

“The comments violated our social media policy and were not aligned with Army values,” Laura DeFrancisco, a spokeswoman for the Army Enterprise Marketing Office, told Army Times. “Out of respect for the safety and well-being of our soldiers and their families, we have disabled the comments.”

Conservative ire over changes in the U.S. military is not new. Many have opposed proposals to allow women to serve in combat roles, including Cruz, who called the idea “nuts” while campaigning for president in 2016. Last week, the commander of a Space Force unit was fired after claiming that the Pentagon was pushing an agenda “rooted in Marxism” for promoting diversity and trying to address extremism within military ranks.

The origins of the spliced TikTok video that Cruz shared on Thursday are murky — an account with the handle @thoughtcrimes_ originally posted it but has since been deactivated and its videos have been removed from the app. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for more information.

Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow for the U.K.-based Center for Analysis of the Radical Right, told The Washington Post that the video surfaced on Twitter when a Dutch user who frequently posts far-right content shared it. A real estate agent from Dallas shared the video from the Dutch user’s post, and Cruz retweeted her.

But Ross said he had been tracking versions of the video on extremist Telegram channels earlier this week. He said the clip popped up repeatedly in channels that promote fascist and anti-Semitic beliefs.

“Ted Cruz is obviously sharing this video that I’ve seen bouncing around some of the most violent and anti-American Telegram accounts that I monitor,” he said. “It just struck me as odd.”

Cruz’s office did not immediately respond to an inquiry late Thursday about whether the senator vetted the source of the video before sharing it.

But Cruz was not alone in panning the Army’s new recruitment ads.

John Noonan, who is an adviser on military and defense affairs for Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), retweeted the same TikTok video with the comment “We are going to be the most tolerant military in history ever to lose a war.”

Cruz replied, “yep.”

Noonan went on to say that he didn’t believe the ad was real.

“It can’t be,” he said. “I just can’t envision someone in the army hierarchy approving it.”

Despite the backlash, Cruz refused to take back his disdain for the video.

“I’m enjoying lefty blue checkmarks losing their minds over this tweet, dishonestly claiming that I’m ‘attacking the military,’ ” he said in a follow-up tweet late Thursday. “Uh, no. We have the greatest military on earth, but Dem politicians & woke media are trying to turn them into pansies.”

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Retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter was midway through his speech at a Memorial Day ceremony in an Ohio cemetery when he started discussing the role that freed Black enslaved people played in an early event honoring Civil War dead.

Suddenly, his microphone cut off. Kemter, 77, tapped it a few times before yelling for assistance, video of the Monday event shows.

“I assumed it was a technical glitch,” Kemter, who carried on with his speech off-mic while he waited for the audio to return, told The Washington Post.

But the disruption was no glitch. One of the event’s organizers later admitted the audio had been deliberately turned down, telling the Akron Beacon Journal that Kemter’s discussion of Black history “was not relevant to our program for the day.”

“We asked him to modify his speech, and he chose not to do that,” Cindy Suchan, president of the Hudson American Legion Auxiliary, told the Beacon Journal.

Now the Ohio American Legion is investigating the incident, and Kemter has accused the organizers of “censoring” him.

“I was very disappointed that someone would choose to censor my speech,” Kemter told The Post.

The Hudson, Ohio, native, who was trained as a combat medic and served in the Army from 1965 through 1995, was invited by Suchan as the keynote speaker for the ceremony in his hometown.

Suchan did not give him any writing prompts, he said, and did not say any topics were off-limits. So, the veteran decided to use this year’s speech as an “educational” opportunity to discuss the holiday’s history.

“Throughout history, there has been a lot of claims about who actually performed the first Memorial Day service,” Kemter told The Post. “With this speech, I chose to educate people as to the origin of Memorial Day and why we were celebrating it.”

Kemter’s speech included details about a Memorial Day commemoration in Charleston, S.C.,organized by a group of Black people freed from enslavement less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.

About three days before his speech, he emailed the text to event organizers. One organizer responded by asking Kemter to revise his speech and “leave out the part of history of it.” The organizer, whom Kemter declined to name, didn’t specify which paragraphs they wanted gone or why they objected, he said.

How much do you know about Memorial Day?

So, after consulting with a Hudson public official, Kemter arrived at Markillie Cemetery on Monday ready to deliver the unedited version of his final draft to the crowd of about 300 people.

Kemter began his speech by discussing how Memorial Day was born after hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died in the American Civil War were in need of a proper burial place. Then, shortly after beginning a discussion of the role that Black Charleston residents played in the holiday, his microphone stopped working.

When his calls for help from a sound engineer didn’t work, he said, “I decided, ‘I don’t need a microphone.’ I just proceeded in my Army command voice.”

Kemter did not think much of it when the audio came back minutes later, just after he had finished discussing the holiday’s Black history.
But after the event, the audio engineer approached to tell him that it was not a malfunction: The event organizers had intentionally muted him, he said.

By then, Kemter said he was surrounded by about 20 people, who congratulated him for a “moving” and “meaningful” speech. He gave out the four printed copies he had brought to the event, he said.

Kemter said he didn’t want a confrontation with organizers, so he left the cemetery without speaking to them.

On Wednesday, Suchan confirmed to the Beacon Journal that either she or Jim Garrison, the adjutant of American Legion Lee-Bishop Post 464, had turned down the audio because the “theme of the day was honoring Hudson veterans.” She declined to confirm who specifically had turned down the volume.

Garrison also refused to say whether he turned down the microphone, telling the Beacon Journal that he had “nothing to add.” He declined to comment when reached by The Post.

Suchan confirmed that event organizers had asked Kemter to revise his speech and said that the two minutes when Kemter’s mic was turned off included some of the paragraphs organizers had objected to.

The Ohio American Legion said it is investigating the incident.

“We take this matter and its allegations seriously. We will investigate and take disciplinary action if necessary,” tweeted the group.

Kemter said that despite the microphone issue, he’s received dozens of messages praising his speech.

“A lot of people viewed this as a healing speech and paying a tribute to the African Americans that started Memorial Day,” Kemter told The Post.

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Reports from the field have been grim.

A male soldier wearing dresses at a combat field hospital. Insubordination and the theft of strawberries on a Navy ship. Leaders more focused on teaching history and moral philosophy than killing hordes of alien bug enemies.

These are some of the satirical responses to a call to action from Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.), who asked service members to submit whistleblower complaints about liberal policies in the force.

“We won’t let our military fall to woke ideology,” Crenshaw said Friday on Twitter.

Crenshaw’s appeal, co-led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a fellow veteran, is a new front in a Republican attack on Defense Department leaders that was prompted by military policy changes, including those that have focused on weeding out extremist troops and removing barriers that have held back women.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others have pilloried such changes, calling them attacks on conservatives in uniform and evidence of an “emasculated military,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said.

Crenshaw’s solicitation was met with a flood of fake claims that ridiculed his effort.

Many responses posted to Twitter were ripped from popular military movies and books, including “The Caine Mutiny,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “M.A.S.H.” and “A Few Good Men.”

Peter Lucier, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan, landed on “Starship Troopers” for his submission. Channeling Johnny Rico from the book and film, Lucier wrote that the human slaughter on planet Klendathu spurred a decision to become an officer. But now he has to sit through History and Moral Philosophy.

“Kill the bugs,” Lucier stated as his goals in a field on the submission form.

The choice was a deliberate one, he said, given the novel’s themes of a fascist government where might is right and citizenship is drawn from service. “This year, we explored the failure of democracy, how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos,” Jean Rasczak, the class professor, said in the film adaptation.



Lucier, a law student who writes about civil and military relations, said Crenshaw and other conservatives have found new ways to channel rage over old debates within the military. Anger over policies such as women in combat roles and gay and transgender people serving openly had typically been reserved for lawmakers and presidential administrations, he said.

Now Crenshaw and others, in a Trump-like populist move, have targeted commanders and defense officials, he said, dividing the military along partisan lines.

“It seems this new version pits members of the military against each other,” he said.

Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL wounded in combat, said in a statement there has been a “disturbing uptick in cases under President Biden” that point to a political agenda in the military. He became concerned last year after the Navy revised its SEAL ethos to include gender-neutral pronouns, he said, which occurred during the Donald Trump administration.

The Navy said the changes reflected new policies allowing women to serve as operators in Naval Special Warfare.

“I have heard countless stories of commands teaching critical race theory, encouraging neutral pronoun use, promoting liberal activist books. We are asking for whistleblower complaints to obtain more specifics, and more evidence, so Americans know what their military is up to,” Crenshaw said.

The effort launched with a salvo of tweets at Crenshaw’s expense.



Ken White, an attorney and commentator better known online as Popehat, was an early driver of joke submissions. “I’m pretty sure our battle tank is actually an RV. This is not a way to maintain military discipline,” White wrote, recalling the plot from the 1980s screwball comedy “Stripes.”

Others looked to “The Caine Mutiny,” and the paranoid commander Queeg’s quixotic search for a strawberry thief, for inspiration, and to the A-Team.

A spokesperson for Crenshaw said the office is sifting through submissions to vet them but did not say how many appeared to be satirical.

Carlson led efforts in March when he decried Air Force flight suits made for pregnant women as a “mockery” of the military. That prompted an unusually strong response from current and retired military leaders.

Last month, Cruz blasted an Army recruiting ad that featured a soldier who was raised by a lesbian couple, contrasting it with a Russian military video. Former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka called the soldier “repugnant.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin defended the policy decisions in the wake of criticism.

“I think we’re doing a great job in terms of recruiting the right kinds of people, providing access to people from every corner, every walk of life in this country,” he told CNN. “As long as you’re fit and you can qualify, there’s a place for you on this team,” he said.

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Prominent white nationalist Shawn McCaffrey is no longer serving in the United States Air Force, HuffPost reported Friday.

A spokesperson told the publication McCaffrey is "no longer serving in the U.S. Air Force."

"Information brought to the attention of his command after Mr. McCaffrey's enlistment led to an entry level separation due to erroneous enlistment," the spokesperson said.

"McCaffrey — who lives near Detroit and did not immediately respond to a request for comment — was a key member of Identity Evropa, a group infamous for its role in the deadly 2017 'Unite The Right' white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia," HuffPost reported. "Although McCaffrey did not attend the Charlottesville rally, he was still very active with Identity Evropa, traveling with its leaders to a white nationalist conference in Washington, D.C., in 2016. In the ensuing years, he remained a fixture on the far right, co-hosting a racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic podcast."

It has been more than three months since HuffPost exposed that McCaffrey was enlisted in the Air Force under the headline, "The Military Says It's Confronting Extremism. A Prominent White Nationalist Just Finished Boot Camp."

The report noted McCaffrey co-hosted a podcast with Matt Evans, where the two regularly bashed Jews, women, sexuality minorities, and others.

"Among the notable white supremacist guests were Richard Spencer; Christopher Cantwell, the 'crying Nazi' infamous for his role in a Vice documentary about the Charlottesville rally; Patrick Little, a former Senate candidate from California who's called for the 'complete eradication' of Jews; Matt Forney, a prominent misogynist who has defended raping and beating women; Tim Gionet, also known as 'Baked Alaska,' who was recently arrested for his role in the Capitol insurrection; and Andrew Anglin, the fugitive founder of The Daily Stormer, one of the most influential and extreme neo-Nazi sites on the internet, who believes Jewish people should be gassed," HuffPost reported.

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hanimmal said:

https://www.rawstory.com/kellanne-conway/View attachment 4982846
Former Donald Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway announced on Wednesday that she was refusing to resign from a military post and that President Joe Biden would have to fire her.

Conway's announcement came after Biden gave Conway a 6 p.m. Wednesday deadline to resign or be fired.

"I will let others evaluate whether they think Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer and others were qualified, or not political, to serve on these boards, but the President's qualification requirements are not your party registration, they are whether you're qualified to serve and whether you're aligned with the values of this administration," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

In a letter posted to Twitter, Conway made it clear she is not aligned with the values of the administration, complaining about Biden's poll numbers, the rise in COVID cases, jobs, inflation, drugs, and Afghanistan.

"I'm not resigning, but you should," Conway said defiantly.

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A neo-Nazi terror cell enmeshed in the US Marine Corps made plans to attack the power grid last fall, hoping the could set the stage to carry out assassinations in their quest to create a white ethno-state, according to a new indictment issued last month.

Arrests in the government's takedown of the terror cell, whose members called themselves "BSN," began in October 2020, starting with founders Liam Montgomery Collins and Paul James Kryscuk, and gradually expanding to include three others through June 2021. Collins and Kryscuk were initially charged with surreptitiously manufacturing and transporting firearms for profit, but in November 2020, a superseding indictment charged them with manufacturing and shipping firearms, including suppressors, "with the intention that they be used unlawfully in the furtherance of civil disorder." As has previously been reported, members fantasized about shooting Black Lives Matter protesters in Boise, Idaho in the summer of 2020.

The most recent indictment, handed down on Aug. 18, adds a new charge of conspiracy to sabotage an energy facility. The purpose, according to the government was "to attack the power grid both for the purpose of creating general chaos and to provide cover and ease of escape in those areas in which they planned to undertake assassinations and other desired operations to further their goal of creating a white ethno-state."

Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, have previously disclosed that the FBI notified them in October 2020 that their names were found on a list in Kryscuk's home in Boise around the time of his arrest.

Kryscuk, the only member of the terror cell without military experience, moved to Boise from the New York City area in early 2020, according to the government. Jordan Duncan, a Marine Corps veteran who is also charged in the conspiracy, joined him there in September 2020 and began working as a contractor for the US Navy in Idaho, while Kryscuk sought work as a private prison guard. Collins finished his Marine Corps service in September, and arrived in Boise the following month.

Three BSN members — Kryscuk, Duncan and Joseph Maurino, then a member of the New Jersey National Guard — met earlier in Boise in July 2020 for what the government describes as "live-fire weapons training."

That month, in an Instagram chat, Kryscuk recommended to Duncan that he "follow BLM Boise" to gain intel from their social media.

Twice over the summer — on July 21 and Aug. 18 — the government alleges, Kryscuk surveilled BLM rallies by parking within eyesight and then slowly driving around the rallies.

Records from Kryscuk and Duncan's Instagram accounts that were pulled by the feds capture a chilling exchange between the two as they casually fantasized about shooting protesters on Oct. 1, only two weeks before a grand jury indicted Kryscuk.

Duncan: "How the BSNs finna be pulling up to chipotle after hitting legs."

Kryscuk: "Death squad…. Assassins creed hoodies and suppressed 22 pistols."

Duncan: "People freaking tf out."

Kryscuk: "About what?"

Duncan: "The end of democracy."

Kryscuk: "One can hope."

The most recent indictment also provides specific details about BSN's preparations to target the power grid, alleging that Collins, Kryscuk and Maurino studied a previous attack by an unknown group that "used assault rifles in an attempt to explode a power substation." A fifth member, Justin Hermanson, allegedly showed a man — identified only as "MW" in court documents — "an animated reenactment of that attack, and told MW that if his group would manage to blow up one of these substations, it would take down the entire regional or coastal power grid and cause chaos for the country."

Collins, Kryscuk, Duncan and Maurino discussed using homemade thermite — described as "a combination of metal powder and metal oxide which burns at temperatures over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit" — to "burn through and destroy power transformers." The government also alleges that Collins, BSN's acknowledged leader, asked Hermanson and MW to Tannerite, a brand of binary explosive that is an ingredient in thermite.

The government alleges that Kryscuk had a list of transformers, substations and other components of the power grid at about a dozen different Idaho and neighboring states on Oct. 20, around the time of his arrest.

Google images submitted as evidence by the government in the case depict three sites in Portland, Ore. and California's Bay Area. They include what appears to be an electrical substation on the Willamette River in Portland; the Zenith Energy terminal, a petroleum storage facility in Portland; and the Menlo Park Rescue site, a shuttered facility next to the Dumbarton Bridge linking Menlo Park to Fremont, in California. The Google images, along with other exhibits, were obtained by Raw Story from a federal courthouse in Wilmington, NC, part of the Eastern District of North Carolina, where the case is charged.

The defendants are set to be arraigned on the new charges in federal court in Wilmington in January.

'Think of it as a modern-day SS'

Liam Montgomery Collins and Paul James Kryscuk, the two earliest members of BSN, met on Iron March, a neo-Nazi online forum founded by Russian nationalist Alexander "Slavros" Mukhitdinov, in 2011. The forum shut down without explanation in November 2017. Two years later, anonymous researchers leaked the entire history of chats, and a website associated with the @JewishWorker Twitter account was set up to provide a searchable database of the contents. In its day, Iron March provided a forum to connect violent racists and allow them to meet up in real life. Participants in the forum, including future members of AtomWaffen and Vanguard America, embraced an accelerationist strain of white supremacy that rejects political solutions and calls for violent insurrection to bring about a race war. AtomWaffen is tied to multiple murders. A man who rallied with Vanguard America at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist marchers, murdering Heather Heyer; a splinter group from Vanguard America rebranded itself as Patriot Front.

Collins and Kryscuk's initial meeting on Iron March in February 2017 began with the two men disclosing their respective ethnicities and religious affiliations.

"New Jersey here," Collins wrote. "What's your ethnicity? Also denomination?"

"Irish and Ukrainian," Kryscuk responded. "Traditional Catholic."

"Interesting lol," Collins wrote. "I'm Irish and Polish. Also a Traditionalist Catholic myself. What part of NYC are you in?"

"I'm a bit north of it in Westchester County."





"It's popping off," Kryscuk told Duncan. "Volatility levels are hitting critical mass." Commenting on a left-wing social-media post denouncing the use of violence to defend property, Kryscuk called the protesters "subhuman" while calling for "mass executions."

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The Air Force says it's trying to dig into systemic issues that have resulted in widespread and consistent racial disparities that have hurt female airmen or Space Force Guardians and service members from racial minorities.

But in an online Facebook town hall Thursday for the services' leaders to discuss racial issues, it was clear that even convincing some service members and leaders that there is a problem remains a challenge.

"We do need to wake up," Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne Bass said when asked what service members should do if they have a leader who dismisses such discussions as "woke culture." Those leaders, she added, should "read the over 17,000 [anonymous] comments from over 100,000 airmen and Guardians that have said there are some challenges" with racial disparities.

The panel's moderator began by noting that the comment section below the Facebook Live event contained multiple comments -- at least dozens, if not hundreds -- from people who felt racial, gender or ethnic disparities in the Air Force and Space Force did not exist, and that the discussion itself was divisive.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall pointed to vast quantities of data that have been compiled by the service's inspector general over the last year and a half showing significant disparities in the way women or those from racial minorities are treated when it comes to promotions, the military justice system, or sexual harassment or assault.

"The data is quite clear on this," Kendall said. "There's not a question about whether it exists or not, as far as I'm concerned."

The IG's second racial disparity report, released Sept. 9, found that Hispanic and Latino, Asian American and Native American officers and enlisted service members were promoted to certain ranks below the overall average rate. Officers in those racial minority groups, for example, were also less likely to hold leadership roles such as squadron, group or wing commander. And enlisted service members in those racial or ethnic groups also were underrepresented among command chiefs and first sergeants.

The first report last year focused on Black service members and found similar trends.

Part of the issue is that the Air Force has tended to choose its leaders from the ranks of operations career fields -- particularly pilots. And because those jobs tend to be filled by white men for reasons that aren't 100% clear to experts, that has resulted in an Air Force leadership that is likewise more white and male.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown, the first Black service chief in U.S. military history, said that the Air Force's overall racial, ethnic and gender diversity has increased in recent years -- but it's not yet where it should be.

Broadening career opportunities for airmen of all backgrounds is crucial to retaining talented airmen, Brown said. And the Air Force's retention trends trouble him.

"We have certain members of diverse backgrounds that don't stick with our Air Force, for whatever reason," Brown said. "We don't fully understand why. But we also want to get people to the senior level, both on the officer and enlisted side, because all of us want to look up and see somebody who looks like us. That will open the door for future opportunities."

Kendall said that the services need white men, like himself, to be aware that some fellow service members are having experiences that differ greatly from theirs.

"When perceptions differ, that's the disparity," he said. "To turn our back on that and ignore it would be exactly the wrong thing."

Kendall acknowledged that some people may "think of this 'woke' stuff as silly, or a waste of time."

But he pointed out that he's been stopped by police 10 or so times in his life, typically for speeding, sometimes in the middle of the night in the country.

When that happens, he said, he might sigh and wonder whether his military ID might be enough to be let off with a warning instead of a ticket.

But, he said, "I've never been afraid once when a cop has stopped me, at any time or at any place. There are a lot of our fellow teammates who have ... had a very different experience."

Kendall encouraged airmen and Guardians from differing backgrounds to have these conversations, to understand where the other is coming from.

"For the rest of us to understand that and appreciate it will take us a little ways down the road of being more ... aware, more conscious, how we all haven't had the same type of experience," he said. "And we can learn from each other about that. And we can all grow together as a result of that."

The high percentage of women who have been victims of sexual harassment -- the latest IG report that came out found that one out of every three female airmen or Guardians, and one out of every four female civilians in the department, had been sexually harassed -- is also "totally unacceptable," Kendall added. He said the Air Force will be ready to adopt changes to the way sexual assaults and related crimes are prosecuted, to remove those decisions from the military's chain of command, as soon as Congress passes legislation requiring the change.

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