Radicalization, Desensitization, and Fear

And the danger of bubbles

Trump holds a campaign-style rally at Fort Bragg., leading the troops in booing and jeering his political enemies.

Amidst the flotsam, jetsam, and miscellany of the day’s news, a few deplorable moments deserve your attention:

• ICE prepares full assault on five Democrat cities as LA goes into lockdown amid immigration riots | Daily Mail Online

• The White House Is Delighted With Events in Los Angeles - The Atlantic

• Trump to ramp up transfers to Guantánamo, including citizens of allies - The Washington Post

• Tulsi Gabbard releases ‘unhinged’ video claiming ‘warmongers’ want a nuclear conflict they know they’ll survive | The Independent

• Fort Bragg crowd boos in support of Trump criticism of LA

• Musk grovels. Elon Musk says he regrets some social media posts he made about Trump

• ABC News drops Terry Moran over late-night post attacking Trump and Stephen Miller | CNN Business

Happy Wednesday.

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The silence of the generals

I’m not going to gild this lily, lipstick this pig, or polish this turd. What happened yesterday was ominous: a glimpse not only of Trump’s politicization of the military — but also of his attempts to radicalize the troops.

“Trump, at Fort Bragg, just had the soldiers behind him boo the news media, Biden, Newsom, Bass, and “men playing in women’s sports”… So now the nation’s soldiers are just props for an authoritarian president—a preview of the June 14 birthday parade to come.” — Larry Sabato

**

Make sure you read this piece in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols. [GIFT LINK]: “As President Donald Trump crossed a dangerous line at Fort Bragg, the brass failed to speak out in the Army’s defense.”

Trump, writes Nichols, led soldiers, “in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.”

The president also encouraged a violation of regulations. Trump, himself a convicted felon, doesn’t care about rules and laws, but active-duty military members are not allowed to attend political rallies in uniform. They are not allowed to express partisan views while on duty, or to show disrespect for American elected officials. Trump may not know these rules and regulations, but the officers who lead these men and women know them well. It is part of their oath, their credo, and their identity as officers to remain apart from such displays. Young soldiers will make mistakes. But if senior officers remain silent, what lesson will those young men and women take from what happened today?

Nichols asks some pointed questions:

Where is the Army chief of staff, General Randy George? Will he speak truth to the commander in chief and put a stop to the assault on the integrity of his troops? Where is the commander of the airborne troops, Lieutenant General Gregory Anderson, or even Colonel Chad Mixon, the base commander?

I think we know the answer. Don’t expect any of them to speak truth to this power. And that, in itself, is ominous. A few days ago, Nichols warned about Trump’s efforts to radicalize “the citizen-soldiers drawn from the community who serve in the National Guard.”

(Seizing the California Guard is also a convenient way to humiliate California Governor Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, with the president’s often-used narrative that liberals can’t control their own cities.) Trump has the right to “federalize” Guard forces, which is how they were deployed overseas in America’s various conflicts.

He has never respected the traditions of American civil-military relations, which regard the domestic deployment of the military as an extreme measure to be avoided whenever possible. Using the Guard could be a devious tactic: He may be hoping to set neighbor against neighbor, so that the people called to duty return to their home and workplace with stories of violence and injuries.

All of this is also serving to de-sensitize Americans to extreme measures, including the militarization of law enforcement. Nick Cattogio writes in the Dispatch: “One of Trump’s great demagogic talents is his ability to desensitize Americans to his transgressions. Often he does it by framing things as “jokes” when they aren’t, like when he talks about making Canada the 51st state or running for a third term.”

“That’s why he’s pouring more troops into Los Angeles despite the situation being “very well under control,” I think.’

I think he’s sending more troops simply to desensitize Americans to the transgression. He wants to be able to deploy the military internally during his presidency as a matter of course, but it’ll take work to weaken the old taboo against doing so. He can’t turn the heat all the way up quickly or the frogs will hop out. So he’s turning it up gradually, starting with a low-stakes situation in L.A.: The violence isn’t widespread, he hasn’t invoked the Insurrection Act, and the troops involved are limited (for now) to protecting federal property and personnel….

He’s seizing an opportunity to plant the seed of possibility about American soldiers policing American streets in hopes of making the country comfortable with the idea.

BONUS: Trump also renamed a bunch of forts for Confederate generals. Well sort of. Via Politico:

“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “We won a lot of battles out of those forts, it’s no time to change.”…

The Army redesignated Fort Liberty, previously known as Fort Bragg, to its original name in February, but honoring Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, a World War II hero instead of the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The service also redesignated Fort Moore, after Gen. Hal Moore and his wife Julia Compton Moore, for Fred G. Benning, who earned the Distinguished Service Cross during World War I.

The danger of bubbles. (Looking at you, Bluesky)

ICYMI, there’s a lively debate about whether Bluesky has become a progressive bubble. Mark Cuban has been one of the site’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders, but is now sounding the alarm about the “lack of diversity of thought” on Bluesky.

Once known for "great give-and-take discussions on politics and news," Cuban said Bluesky had become a monoculture where dissent was unwelcome and nuance was vanishing.

Cuban posted:

The replies on here may not be as racist as Twitter, but they damn sure are hateful.

Talk AI: FU, AI sucks go away

Talk Business: Go away Talk Healthcare: Crickets.

Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist.

We are forcing posts to X

He’s not wrong.¹

**

Cuban was commenting on this piece by Megan McArdle: “Bluesky’s decline stems from never hearing from other side” - The Washington Post.

McArdle cited a recent Pew Research Center analysis that found that user engagement was sharply down on the progressive site. Bluesky, she wrote, has become “something of an echo chamber where it’s hard to get positive engagement unless you’re saying things progressives want to hear — and where the negative engagement on things they don’t want to hear can be intense.”

But, Josh Barro has a decidedly contrarian take about Bluesky’s monoculture. Bluesky is not a bubble, he writes, “It’s a Containment Dome”.

Twitter used to be a place where the most neurotic and censorious liberal influencers were highly effective at influencing events within media organizations and the Democratic Party. But was that actually ever good for liberal causes?…

McArdle raised similar questions about progressive social media influence in the Before Times:

Progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves, securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them. Thus, that national conversation ended up skewed toward liberal views, creating the illusion that their ideas were more popular than they actually were. That’s a major reason that institutions went all-in on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and why the 2020 Democratic primary field moved so far to the left that Kamala Harris was still struggling to backtrack four years later.

Barro expands on her critique:

A lot of the blame for the self-inflicted wounds of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary should go to The Groups: it was the ACLU that got Kamala Harris to commit to taxpayer-funded sex changes for criminals and detained migrants.

But one of the reasons Democrats didn’t realize it was a big mistake to make promises and statements that made them sound wacky was that they were constantly being yelled at on Twitter by people whose unpopular viewpoints they mistook for broad public opinion.¹ The screamers won the battle but they lost the war: they pressured their own candidates into manufacturing attack ad fodder for Republicans, and as a result, Donald Trump is president again.

By rupturing the Twitter user base, he (accidentally?) created a firewall between the most maladjusted liberal posters on the internet and the reporters, Democratic politicians and operatives who used to pay an excessive amount of attention to their harangues.

So…. quarantining the wooliest folks on the Left might actually have some benefits for Democrats.

I believe the emergence of this firewall is one reason for the renaissance that we were seeing at WelcomeFest last week:² Democrats are becoming more cognizant of public opinion and less fearful of breaking with the activist base because they are no longer receiving so much activist messaging in the form of aggrieved Twitter push alerts on their phones.

**

Finally

Seriously, you don’t want to be this guy:

Wednesday dogs

The boys are ready for summer.

1. This is how it works. On MSNBC yesterday, I mentioned that it was unwise that protesters are waving Mexican flags.

And, of course on Bluesky:

2. Via the NYT: “At ‘CPAC of the Center,’ Democratic Moderates Beat Up on the Left.”

[The] thrust of the day’s discussion was dismissing the party’s left wing as an anchor to Democratic chances to win national elections. Scattered potshots were aimed at the activist group Indivisible throughout the day, with Representative Jared Golden of Maine, who represents the most pro-Trump district of any Democrat in the House, calling it “a hyper-national organization with a very single-minded agenda.”…

Nobody had anything good to say about people on social media.

“Being yelled at on Bluesky is good,” said Mr. Jain, who co-founded Split Ticket, an election analytics firm. Mocking people he sees as keyboard warriors who take shots at the center, he added: “You’re not fighting fascism, you’re posting on your phone. If you want to fight fascism, go and win elections.”

Bruises from digital bullying by the left were a recurring theme.