Category Archives: MAGA

47, Activism, Antiwar activism, Civil War, Coup, Crusade, Democracy, Fire This Time, Lawful protest, MAGA, Military Matters, North Carolina, Quaker House, Quakers, Resistance, The Military Industrial Complex, Trump, Tyranny

For June 14: Don’t Miss This Big Chance to Find Allies Among the Troops (We Need Them.)

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This “billboard” is meant to be the first of a series in the runup to the June 14 “NO KINGS” protests.

The strategy of the series is to widen the gap between Trump-Hegseth (TH) and many troops, and remind them (and others watching) that their oath is to defund the Constitution (not a wannabe monarch). It also will remind them that domestic deployments (sending troops against U. S. Citizens here in the “homeland”) is both illegal AND a very REAL threat under rule by TH. (The troops have been taught this.)

This approach is based on my eleven years as Director of Quaker House in North Carolina, near Fort Bragg/Liberty. There we counseled dissident troops, and organized well over 150 peace protests, large & small, in the midst of one of the biggest military communities.

In our work we learned early on that to get our messages across, it was CRITICAL that our public witness constantly express “support” and respect for the troops, even while rejecting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

We were surrounded by many troops and veterans who had been brainwashed by Fox News etc. to believe we hated and looked down on soldiers (which we did NOT), and were atheist commies, etc. which we also weren’t.

(Sorry, lefties.)

Just in case you think I’m exaggerating about the attempts to smear us as “troop-haters & Commies”; this was in Smithfield NC, in October 2007.

We DID “support” them, in our Quaker ways, as persons of conscience, many of whom had moral questions about the war and military culture. We worked to help them clarify their personal moral convictions (if they asked), privately and for free. We didn’t try to make them Quakers or pacifists.

The efforts to push us and our work into a polarized frame never stopped (and this was years before MAGA appeared). And our “Yes to the Troops/No to the Wars” pushback was just as steadfast.

It paid off. In the first two years of the Iraq invasion, our vigils in downtown Fayetteville often drew catcalls and one-finger salutes. But then, with the war bogged down and casualties kept mounting, morale shifted and we began to get thumbs up, and even an occasional cheer.

As the war’s cost climbed ever higher, our “Yes to the troops” became more credible, as we weren’t locked into a polarized frame.

In 2025, there are many issues facing conscientious servicemembers. Some surfaced at the West Point commencement last month. While the big media didn’t notice, the thousand graduating cadets watched and listened as West Point Superintendent General Steven Gilland subtly but fiercely denounced Trump’s character to his face as utterly beyond the pale of every section of the academy’s strict honor code. The sitting  Commander in Chief would have been booted out of West Point with the first of his multitude of indictments; along with his skeezy Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth (who didn’t even show up).

Hegseth taking aim

But these two “leaders” are also the pair who seem determined to loose the military on the American citizenry, in defiance of the law and the oath those thousand cadets took to defend, not a president but the Constitution.

 Hegseth published an entire book about his fixed vision of a real medieval-style crusade to “annihilate” the enemies within (mostly, besides migrants, that would be us).

If that dire push should come to shove, will there be a significant portion of the officer corps and troops who will stand by their oath in the crunch? In real life, coups fail if they don’t keep control of the national military.

Those of us who will be protesting Trump’s vanity parade are more than spectators (or targets): we can evade the ginned-up polarization and appeal to the best in the uniformed ranks. Sure, the military tends to be more conservative than the general population, and extremists are hard at work recruiting there.

But that’s not the end of the story. How we communicate with them could make a difference, maybe a key difference.

Our motto at Quaker House can be adjusted: NO To The COUP.  Remember Your Oath. Defend The Constitution. NO To Domestic Deployments.

I have more sign ideas, and will add some soon.

But if you’re on board, you write the next ones. And pass this on.

pVb/h June 14 will be here quick. Get ready. I’ll catch up.

“New Normal”, 47, Conservative Perspectives, Crusade, Current Affairs, Death & Dying, DEI, Election 2024, MAGA, Military Matters, Minority Rule, Signs of the Times, Trump, War & Peace, War Notes

Pete Hegseth The Crusader Reveals the Two Truly-Madly-Deeply Lethal Loves of His Life

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In official statements, Pete Hegseth calls the first one, “Lethality.”

Usually it’s a dry, abstract word. A term that’s launched a thousand PowerPoint slide shows. It’s ideal for air-conditioned classrooms, lit by rows of long tubular fluorescent bulbs. Under the lights, as it is repeated, rows of men in uniform listen, many taking notes, or (if it’s shortly after lunch, struggleto keep their eyes open).

Or at a crowded congressional hearing. “If you’re confirmed as Secretary of Defense,” asked a U. S. Senator, “what would be your mission, Mr. Hegseth?”

It’s the first  significant noun he emits (after, of course, the name Trump), in a crisply-memorized litany:

“He, like me, wants a Pentagon laser-focused on lethality, meritocracy, war-fighting, accountability and readiness.”

Continue reading Pete Hegseth The Crusader Reveals the Two Truly-Madly-Deeply Lethal Loves of His Life →

47, Black & White & Other Colors, DEI, Election 2024, KKK, LGBTQ & Gender, MAGA, Quaker House, Signs of the Times

Pete Hegseth Wants to “Bleach the Barracks,” Starting By Firing the Top Black General

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Just wrote a blog post on the nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense.

It’s posted on the blog of my former employer, Quaker House of Fayetteville NC, near Fort Liberty (neé Fort Bragg).

Hegseth, taking aim

The post deals with aspects of Hegseth’s program that were hardly mentioned in his Senate hearing on January 14: his public targeting of the one top-level Black officer, Air Force General C. Q. Brown, to be fired, based on a four-minute video he made after the George Floyd murder.

 

Brown has had an honorable & successful 40-

General C. Q. Brown, Jr. Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Target #1

year military career. It’s clear Hegseth can’t tolerate that. He wants to make Brown the first, highest-ranking scapegoat in a projected anti-woke, military-wide “crusade” to eradicate anything he considers “woke” (it’s a very long list), first from the military, and then from American society at large.

Why this crusade plan was not taken up seriously in Hegseth’s Senate hearing is not clear. Voices can still be raised about it.

More details about Brown and Hegseth’s scheme are in the full post (the views in which are personal & unofficial), are here:

45, Arts: Blogging, Election 2024, MAGA, North Carolina, Politics—U. S., Trump

My Secret Post-Election Plan: Celebration?? Or Consolation??

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I’m still not making predictions about the election’s outcome. And I’m so over searching for the hidden meanings in polls.  My record of not answering the non-Hurricane flood of robocalls remains unbroken. Not least, I voted two weeks — seems like two months — ago.

So now there’s only one big question hanging over the official end of this endless campaign season, namely:

What am I gonna do when we have a winner?

I think I’ve found my answer. It’s in a compact box in the cupboard, that turned up at a nearby market: the key ingredient for a forbidden feast.

It’s something I’ve been waiting for a long time. So if the post- voting wrangling lasts til January 19, 2025, I think I can hold out that much longer. (After that, we’ll have to see.) Or if I get trapped in a hundred-hour traffic backup between Niagara Falls and the Canadian border, all bets are off.

But enough of such catastrophizing: time for a bit of untrammeled fantasy: Continue reading My Secret Post-Election Plan: Celebration?? Or Consolation?? →

Activism, Carolina & the World, Civil War, Cross-Generational Issues, Current Affairs, Curtains for the Confederacy, Democrats, Election 2024, Harris-Walz, MAGA, Minority Rule, North Carolina, Quakers, Remarkable Friends, Republicans, Signs of the Times

A Quaker Doing His Incognito Bit in North Carolina Politics

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Lately it’s been hard to find yard signs for the disgraced pizza-and-pornstar NC Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Governor Mark Robinson. But this one was in Burlington a few days back.

Burlington is in North Carolina’s Alamance County, once notorious as a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan back in the day, Neo-Confederates now. A 35-foot statue of a rebel soldier still guards the county courthouse, and the monument itself is surrounded by a thick wrought iron fence and plenty of Don’t-Tread-On-Me attitude.

The county voted against Obama twice by ten-point margins, and for Trump in 2016 by 14 and in 2020 by 8.

During Covid it was a locus for pandemic mask and mandate defiance. When Hispanic Democrat Ricky Hurtado managed to unseat a Republican state rep a few years back, the supermajority GOP legislature promptly re-drew the district and pushed Hurtado out in 2022.

Nevertheless, to lift our spirits on Thursday, Oct. 3, the Fair Wendy and I drove straight into Alamance and then Burlington, to a modest storefront on the edge of downtown. If too much of the county is still stuck in a revanchist fantasy past, this was an outpost of a very different Alamance future that is beginning to unfold.

Alamance County NC Democratic Party office

Yes, Alamance has Democrats. And they’re on the move. Their monthly meeting is the first Thursday, and inside, the joint was jumping.

The session was predictably focused on the last climactic weeks of the current  campaign; but there were a couple of important preliminaries :

First, a discussion of relief efforts for the hurricane-devastated city of Asheville and other communities in western NC. (My contribution was some bottled water.) The County Chair, Ron Osborne (above) knows such emergency work inside and out: he specialized in it for Duke Power as an electrical engineer, managing large crews who helped get the lights back on in the wake of dozens of the worst storms and floods from Katrina to Sandy. Osborne pointed out the safest and most useful ways for those of us who managed to dodge the deluge of Helene to do our bit.

Ron Osborne holds a prized possession, a book autographed by Jimmy Carter, as he speaks of the 39th president’s achievements at turning his religious faith into continuing practice.

Then he turned to a more pleasant landmark, the 100th birthday of Jimmy Carter. The 39th president was clearly a model for Osborne: another southerner, who publicly renounced his segregationist heritage, and overcame the experience of defeat in 1980 to build a long and uniquely productive post-political career with a multitude of projects, from building houses for the poor to preventing wars and reducing the toll of guinea worm disease from multimillions annually to thirteen (yes, 13) cases in 2023.

Seneca Rogers, a school board candidate in Burlington, addresses the session.

Osborne even made a pilgrimage which I long hoped to make, to Plains, Georgia, to join in the Sunday Bible classes Carter taught for more than 40 years whenever he was in town.

Then to the main business of the meeting, which was a series of rapid-fire short speeches by candidates for local offices, county commission, and district judgeships. The multicultural character of the lineup was a standing rebuke to the dogged whiteness of the rival party (does Mark Robinson count? Thats above my paygrade . . . .)

The enthusiasm level was high, and the candidates welcomed the intensity before them in the campaign’s frenzied final month.

Jaded pundits might still be noting that the Carolina GOP has been  gerrymandering and suppressing votes nonstop for fourteen years (true) and is counting on the institutional bias it has been cementing to hold back the rising insurgency growing around the corner in their Alamance stronghold (true again.)

Your faithful blogger, with the sticker he was awarded at the meeting’s conclusion, since the supply of the ”Old White Geezers for Harris-Walz” stickers was gone. They accepted my solemn affirmation that I’m an emeritus member of the youth cohort.

And to further harsh my buzz, they can carp, “So Alamance is happening; fine. But there’s 100 counties in NC, and what about the other 99??” And true, I don’t get out that much.
Finally, they’ll repeat that the polls are all tight as a tick, margin of error, yada yada. (Undeniable.) So is my optimism just whistling Dixie??

Well, I’ve resigned from the Pundit Prediction Panel, so I’ll concede the prognosticators may turn out to be right. However, I’ll recklessly stick a toe back in this muddy pool, and forecast that, at least in Alamance County, the NC Democrats in 2024 will  — wait for it — Do BETTER.

Will that be enough to save us?

Check back with me in a month.

[Note: Here’s the part for Quakers: Ron Osborne is a longtime member of Spring Friends Meeting, which has been in Alamance County for more than 250 years. He’s also a Quaker history buff, like me.  He’s enjoying his retirement, and I don’t think he likes political campaigning much more than hurricanes, but like saving lives devastated by the latter, helping rescue democracy by the former is a part of his low-key but diligent and distinctive Quaker witness.]