Insider Threat

Political Warfare Inside USMIL

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There are those who serve God-Family-Republic and those who serve the crown. Know the difference and choose your friends wisely. I do not serve the crown.

-Max Morton

Recently Kristina Wong wrote an article exposing some highly revelatory U.S. Army inside baseball. The story outlines the quest of Army Major Jess Dawson to dox the front man for the online consortium of military truth tellers known as Terminal CWO.¹ As relayed in the article, Dawson’s self-appointed mission was a resounding success. With the help of an Army 3-Star General and other key players, she identified the pseudonymous “Danny Erickson” as CW2 Sam Shoemate. This operation culminated in Sam receiving a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand (GOMOR), which may well have ended his career if he didn’t already have an approved retirement date.² Jess identified Sam as an “insider threat” and took the necessary steps to neutralize him. By what authority did Jess unilaterally assess a fellow Soldier as an insider threat, though? What if Soldiers like Jess are the real insider threats? Your interpretation will depend entirely on where your true loyalties lie.

The Republic or The Crown

Since Sam and Jess swore the same oath to the same Constitution, it seems like they should be on the same side. Unfortunately, it has become quite clear that they are not. Like so many issues in the modern world the explanation is at once both hopelessly complex and painfully simple. The simple part of the explanation is that Sam and Jess have fundamentally opposing loyalties. Sam serves The Republic. Jess serves The Crown. The complex part is trying to delineate the difference between these two concepts. What makes it so difficult to disentangle and describe is the influence of postmodernism permeating any dialogue that attempts to drill down into fundamental axioms pertaining to things like loyalty, duty, and purpose. I won’t try to define postmodernism here, if you’re looking for a primer I can recommend this book which I encountered ruminating under the shade of the great

Tree of Woe

. For the purpose of this essay let me just say that postmodernism facilitates the redefinition of words and concepts long understood to mean one thing to mean something else entirely. As I’ll explore later, Jess Dawson’s selected works from her website indicate that she relies on postmodernism to justify her positions that ultimately serve The Crown.

The Republic

A Republic, if you can keep it…

-Benjamin Franklin

The corrupting influence of power was well understood by America’s founders. Great care was taken to keep power in check by distributing it across multiple branches, exposing it to popular pressure, and explicitly delineating certain key natural rights. By examining these rights we can understand most readily the extent to which the Constitution is a grand attempt at creating a government consilient with natural law. The first amendment assures us the government has no right to determine what is True. The second makes it clear that government is not to be granted a monopoly on force. The third recognizes that without the ability to control who enters your property, there is no property (and has underappreciated implications related to modern digital surveillance). Swearing an oath to the Constitution is swearing an oath to uphold natural law.³ Those who serve The Republic recognize that the government is meant to organize society in accordance with a transcendent nature. Understanding the full scope and scale of nature exceeds the capacity of men. We seek to understand and live in accordance with God and His Will, or simply nature’s law, but none of us have the authority to unilaterally establish or determine Truth. This necessarily includes the men and women who make up and operate our government.

It is from this position of epistemic humility that the adversarial process of our court system is derived. We don’t put our trust in highly educated technocrats to determine the gravest matters of import. We put our trust in an impartial jury.⁴ Of course, we can’t capture the majesty of natural law and its importance in a document as short as the Constitution, or perhaps any document at all no matter how long and detailed. This is why John Adams famously observed “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” As intended, the Constitution is meant to serve a nature that we can glimpse, but may never fully understand. By adhering to key principles, though, we can be confident that we are more or less aligned with nature’s law. Stripped of this context, however, the plain language of the Constitution can be easily twisted to serve an entirely different master.

The Crown

It was once common for sovereigns to claim some divine right to rule. Today our ruling elite have largely adopted assumptions consistent with this. They worship at the feet of Progress, and from this worship they derive their own divine right to rule.⁵ This is antithetical to the principles that made our Republic great, but this truth can’t survive long in a mind submerged in the corrosive bath of postmodernism. Those who serve The Crown long ago conquered every institution sufficiently insulated from routine reality testing. This leaves us left to contend with legions of academics, bureaucrats, politicians, attorneys, human resource professionals, judges, and military leaders skilled in the perversion of language from its natural role in facilitating communication (and thereby enabling the formation of civilization) to a cynical tool wielded in the name of carceral power. Some see this as the true state of nature and play to win towards whatever ends they desire in their hearts. Some desire wealth, comfort, or domination with complete self-awareness. Others assume nobility permeates even their most malicious behaviors secondary to their imagined service to the oppressed. Whether they are aware of the game they are playing or not is largely irrelevant. The outcome will be always be the same. Some understand they are forcing the head of The Republic under the surface in their quest to satisfy their libido dominandi. Others believe they are applying a rich emollient to salve an oppressive system in the name of Progress. Service to The Crown has taken many shapes over the eons. These basic characterizations describe a range of those who serve The Crown in the current age.

Indicators and Warnings

There are several shibboleths scattered about Jess Dawson’s page indicating both an allegiance to The Crown and an affinity for postmodern “rationale.” By her fruits we can recognize her as a typical representation of the Head Girl archetype in the modern age. She earned a PhD in Sociology from Duke University. She is the director of a federally funded scholarship program that openly discriminates against white male students. Her research interests focus foremost on “nationalism” and “white supremacy.” Digging into her work reveals an eager willingness to rewrite the history of steadfast commitment to fundamental natural rights as the recent product of religious fundamentalism. Her concerns about the collection of data on service members ascribes capitalism as the main culprit. She routinely ignores the central role the federal government has played, and continues to play in this space. This ignorance is made to look especially galling since the release of the Twitter Files demonstrating in painful detail the extent to which “private” tech companies have been brought to heel by The Crown over the last few years.

Much of this is rather subtle and unlikely to raise the suspicions of those unfamiliar with the details and ideological nuances surrounding these complex issues. How many people know the secret military history of the internet outlined by Yasha Levine? How many understand the role Alphabet has played in shaping electoral politics with ephemeral experiences?⁶ Who really understands the heavy influence of Deism on the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution? Occasionally, though, Jess tips her hand and demonstrates her full throated supported for The Crown and all the egregious stupidity this entails when it serves powerful special interests. From her paper Microtargeting as Information Warfare:

The misinformation environment is not only an overseas operational concern. The considerable misinformation surrounding masks during the COVID pandemic negatively impacted training and readiness for the military. Entire ships were docked as the crew became infected and the military infection rate in some cases exceeded the national level. The military is made up of regular Americans and is not immune to the political debate about masks and freedom. Algorithmic targeting of servicemembers with misinformation has a very different impact on national defense than on other communities, and these consequences do not disappear within the geographic boundaries of the US.

Jess goes so far as to cite an opinion editorial where leaders attribute increased infection rates to increased testing to justify several baseless assumptions within this short passage.

1. Masks are effective towards preventing the transmission of SARS-CoV2.

2. “Misinformation” has convinced service members that this is not the case.

3. This has resulted in increased infection rates.

4. Mask mandates enhance training and readiness

While she doesn’t make any sort of rational case to justify any of these assumptions, we know from the wider context that she didn’t need to because she was simply deferring to The Crown. The Narrative was very clear that Masks Work. Equivocal literature amassed over the last hundred years examining this topic was roundly ignored, and why wouldn’t it be? There is no science but The Science. Any who open their mouths to disagree are ipso facto spreading “misinformation.” This is how these terms have been defined in the ongoing postmodern war. That a Cochrane Review demonstrating the frank inability of masks to impact the spread of an aerosolized virus in painstaking detail has since been published is irrelevant. If confronted by this reality, regime sycophants like Jess can be expected to make the kinds of arguments we encounter from a deeply psychologically and spiritually broken Sam Harris here:

In this video Harris echoes sentiments expressed throughout Dawson’s work. The idea that an outrage machine driven by profit motive is the only possible reason anyone could disagree with the Perfect Rationality expressed and disseminated by The Crown is one of the implicit themes of Dawson’s paper on microtargeting. The hubris to not even be able to imagine a situation where they are wrong is a key trait shared by many who serve The Crown. So where do we go from here?

Skin in the Game

How do we contend with people who are so certain they are right that they casually transgress against the values they swore to uphold? I’m not sure I have a satisfying answer. All I know is that I feel compelled to call it like I see it, and I see Jess Dawson as a principle threat to the Constitution. By trampling on the first amendment rights of a fellow service member she demonstrates that her true loyalties lie elsewhere. She is loyal to The Crown whereas I am loyal to The Republic. This makes us enemies. Just as I’m confident she would characterize Chief Shoemate as an extremist of some variety, I’m sure she would see me as the same. We can’t both be right. Unfortunately there is no reality test or independent arbiter at this point to help us determine who is right other than the American people. I’m content to let the American people decide such things because we really don’t have another choice. The thing is, that requires that the government doesn’t act to restrict first amendment rights. The vast censorship apparatus outlined by the twitter files and the work of people like Mike Benz at the Foundation for Freedom Online demonstrates that our own government is heavily involved in the censorship of populist political narratives. This justification is the very same predicate Jess Dawson attempts to establish in her paper:

There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the government from regulating industries, especially dangerous industries and their products. For all the good these technologies have enabled, there is ample evidence that they are enabling the erosion of the foundations of freedom and democracy.

Got that? We have to use the force of government to infringe upon individual liberty to protect “freedom and democracy.”

Accountability

There is little accountability for anyone anywhere in USMIL anymore. This essentially leaves individual service members to hold themselves accountable. I salute Sam Shoemate for doing exactly that. I see Jess Dawson, on the other hand, as an insider threat herself. If you can just change the definition of what it means to serve the Constitution, then we don’t have a Constitutional Republic anymore. If liberal white women with sociology degrees are allowed to determine when it is appropriate to violate natural law and escape consequences for doing so, is there anything left to defend? I don’t know. What I do know is that if the only Soldiers left fighting for accountability are illegally targeted by insiders who demonstrate open contempt for Constitutional limitations on government power, then we’re in serious trouble. The senior ranks are filled with those who happily bend the knee to The Crown and seek to purge those loyal to The Republic. They use proxy characterizations in typical postmodern fashion to do this, and since USMIL can’t retain anyone capable of nuanced strategic thought, few seem to notice, let alone complain about it.

Dialectical Political Warfare

Since I don’t want to come off as just complaining (although I do admit that this is cathartic), I’ll close by tying this all in to James Lindsay’s analysis of the recent Trump indictments and how they (and this) can be best understood as dialectical political warfare. I encourage you to read the entire thread. All I will say here is that this campaign instigated by Jess against Sam is an example of political warfare. Jess perceived Sam as a political enemy and took the necessary steps to neutralize him. These active measures serve an additional purpose though, as do all of those “leaders” who engage on #Miltwitter. Aside from doxing and harassing political opponents on social media, all of these active measures serve to elicit a reaction from and/or humiliation of political opponents. Forcing conservative service members to process travel payments for Soldiers needing to cross state lines to obtain elective abortions is all upside. You satisfy political allies, you humiliate any support against their conscience, and you hope maybe one will refuse and make a scene warranting “extremism” training and additional humiliation rituals. Never mind the Hyde Amendment that makes it very clear this practice is illegal. As with the mrna gene therapy mandates, the fact that is it illegal is all upside. That they can force you to comply and participate in something their enemies find morally repugnant satisfies their libido dominandi like nothing else.

Way Ahead

Judicious action always starts with getting people to see the play clearly. You're playing against a watching audience in any mid-level violence provocation (decision dilemma). You win by getting the audience to see the illegitimacy of the provocation THEN acting rightly.

James Lindsay

Cooler heads must prevail if we’re to have any hope of winning this war. Try to understand things as they are, and be able to explain things as such. Our enemies are morally repugnant. Back when I started in the military we used to sing cadences about killing communists. Now they are in charge. It would be easy to lose composure about such an unpleasant twist of fate, especially for people like me who hate communists with a burning passion. Allowing this hatred to cloud our judgement is not a luxury we can afford. We need to understand who these people are and what they want. We need to understand them well enough that we can love them. Then, we need to use this understanding to wrest control of the country back from them. Not out of hatred, but out of simple understanding that they will destroy everything we hold dear if allowed to achieve their objectives.

1. I consider Terminal CWO to be an excellent source of information on corruption and malfeasance within the DoD. It has also been demonstrated to be one of the only ways to hold leaders accountable by exposing the most egregious actions to the American public who can then apply pressure to their elected representatives. Critics will say that exposing corruption undermines public confidence in the institution making it an ipso facto unacceptable practice. I disagree with this sentiment. I believe that public confidence in an organization should be undermined if that confidence is unwarranted given the ground-level truth of the nature of that organization.

2. Since that date has now passed, in case you ever get a chance to read this, congratulations Sam, it was an honor to serve with you.

3. The traditionally religious can typically see this most clearly. The devout can see when the men and women of government come to see themselves or the organization they represent to be above God.

4. Referring here, of course, to the sixth amendment.

5. If only within the confines of their own tyrannical minds.

6. Jess rather hilariously implies in her microtargeting article that her political opponents have been largely responsible for employing this tactic. It is quite the opposite. For this reason her concerns seems more consistent with forming a censorship predicate.