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The FBI’s Monday afternoon raid on Mar-a-Lago may be the most shameful story for the Regime to emerge this past Monday, but surprisingly, it wasn’t the most embarrassing. That honor goes, instead, to the New Yorker’s lengthy report on the clash between President Trump and the generals who so treacherously “served” him during his administration. The article, entitled “Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals”, is extracted from an upcoming book, “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” authored by reporters Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. The book describes sustained efforts by America’s military leaders to frustrate, ignore, undermine, and, if necessary, defy President Trump in favor of their preferred military-political agenda.

We all know about the rot and failure within the United States military. America’s soldiers are too fat. They crash their planes too much. They lose wars to goatherds with AK-47s. When it comes to the generals, they are woke, parasitic, and incompetent. Revolver has said much about the pathetic generals who command America’s armed forces, and the humiliating contrast they create with the great leaders of America’s past.

But only on Monday did it become clear how dumb they really are. The New Yorker story is peppered with insider quotes and gossip that clearly could have only come from the generals themselves, who have every incentive to make themselves look good. But alas, as surely enough as a fool who opens his mouth removes all doubt, the generals in their loquaciousness only managed to reveal their own vacuity. General Milley was perhaps the most ridiculous to feature in the article. This was not even the most revealing anecdote, but it’s a start:

In the Oval Office, Trump said right from the start that he was considering Milley for chairman of the Joint Chiefs. When Trump offered him the job, Milley replied, “Mr. President, I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.”

On Afghanistan, Milley said he believed that a complete withdrawal of American troops, as Trump wanted, would cause a serious new set of problems. And Milley had already spoken out publicly against the banning of transgender troops, which Trump was insisting on.

“Mattis tells me you are weak on transgender,” Trump said.

“No, I am not weak on transgender,” Milley replied. “I just don’t care who sleeps with who.”

Apparently, Mark Milley’s idea of looking awesome is to brag about the time he urged the president to spend millions of dollars cutting soldiers’ testicles off. That is, if the line is even real.

The entire article is peculiarly filled with supposed conversations where Milley or some other general has the perfect cinematic one-liner for standing up to Trump. Of course, all the generals hated the idea of a military parade in Washington, D.C.:

Sure enough, Trump returned to Washington determined to have his generals throw him the biggest, grandest military parade ever for the Fourth of July. The generals, to his bewilderment, reacted with disgust. “I’d rather swallow acid,” his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, said. Struggling to dissuade Trump, officials pointed out that the parade would cost millions of dollars and tear up the streets of the capital.

…

The subject came up again during an Oval Office briefing that included Trump, Kelly, and Paul Selva, an Air Force general and the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kelly joked in his deadpan way about the parade. “Well, you know, General Selva is going to be in charge of organizing the Fourth of July parade,” he told the President. Trump did not understand that Kelly was being sarcastic. “So, what do you think of the parade?” Trump asked Selva. Instead of telling Trump what he wanted to hear, Selva was forthright.

“I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,” Selva said. “Portugal was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added, “It’s not who we are.”

Even after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. “So, you don’t like the idea?” he said, incredulous.

“No,” Selva said. “It’s what dictators do.”

And then, everybody in the audience stood up and clapped.

Apparently, America doesn’t do military parades, because that’s what dictators do? Don’t tell that to the veterans who marched in the National Gulf War Victory Parade in 1991.

And here’s a picture from the New York City Victory Parade of 1946:

Looks pretty grand.

Perhaps the opposition to parades at the highest level of the military is the clearest indication that the institution has been captured by mediocre middling midwits.

Later on in the article, we learn that General Milley gave a groveling apology for cracking down on violent and lawless rioters threatening an insurrection against a lawfully elected president because he didn’t want to offend black people:

Early on the evening of June 1, 2020, Milley failed what he came to realize was the biggest test of his career: a short walk from the White House across Lafayette Square, minutes after it had been violently cleared of Black Lives Matter protesters. Dressed in combat fatigues, Milley marched behind Trump with a phalanx of the President’s advisers in a photo op, the most infamous of the Trump Presidency, that was meant to project a forceful response to the protests that had raged outside the White House and across the country since the killing, the week before, of George Floyd. Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.

…

Publicly, Lafayette Square looked like a debacle for Milley. Several retired generals had condemned his participation, pointing out that the leader of a racially diverse military, with more than two hundred thousand active-duty Black troops, could not be seen opposing a movement for racial justice. Even Mattis, who had refrained from openly criticizing Trump, issued a statement about the “bizarre photo op.” The Washington Post reported that Mattis had been motivated to do so by his anger at the image of Milley parading through the square in his fatigues.

…

Milley decided to apologize in a commencement address at the National Defense University that he was scheduled to deliver the week after the photo op. Feaver’s counsel was to own up to the error and make it clear that the mistake was his and not Trump’s. Presidents, after all, “are allowed to do political stunts,” Feaver said. “That’s part of being President.”

Milley’s apology was unequivocal. “I should not have been there,” he said in the address. He did not mention Trump. “My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” It was, he added, “a mistake that I have learned from.”

Mark Esper certainly didn’t do himself any favors in his time serving Trump, either (emphasis ours):

Esper was also on notice. Two days after Lafayette Square, the Defense Secretary had gone to the Pentagon pressroom and offered his own apology, even revealing his opposition to Trump’s demands to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the active-duty military. Such a step, Esper said, should be reserved only for “the most urgent and dire of situations.” Trump later exploded at Esper in the Oval Office about the criticism, delivering what Milley would recall as “the worst reaming out” he had ever heard.

The next day, Trump’s latest chief of staff, Mark Meadows, called the Defense Secretary at home—three times—to get him to recant his opposition to invoking the Insurrection Act. When he refused, Meadows took “the Tony Soprano approach,” as Esper later put it, and began threatening him, before eventually backing off. (A spokesperson for Meadows disputed Esper’s account.) Esper resolved to stay in office as long as he could, “to endure all the shit and run the clock out,” as he put it. He felt that he had a particular responsibility to hold on. By law, the only person authorized to deploy troops other than the President is the Secretary of Defense. Esper was determined not to hand that power off to satraps such as Robert O’Brien, who had become Trump’s fourth and final national-security adviser, or Ric Grenell, a former public-relations man who had been serving as acting director of National Intelligence.

Wow, what a hero.

The article goes on with yet another steaming hot anecdote about (from?) Milley:

After Esper’s firing, Milley summoned Patel and Cohen separately to his office to deliver stern lectures. Whatever machinations they were up to, he told each of them, “life looks really shitty from behind bars. And, whether you want to realize it or not, there’s going to be a President at exactly 1200 hours on the twentieth and his name is Joe Biden. And, if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.” Cohen denied that Milley said this to him, insisting it was a “very friendly, positive conversation.” Patel also denied it, asserting, “He worked for me, not the other way around.” But Milley told his staff that he warned both Cohen and Patel that they were being watched: “Don’t do it, don’t even try to do it. I can smell it. I can see it. And so can a lot of other people. And, by the way, the military will have no part of this shit.”

Did Milley actually say any of this, or just concoct it to sound good in a reporter’s book? We may never know. But the article itself provides all the evidence necessary to Milley is anything but an intellectual juggernaut. The New Yorker shares the full text of a resignation letter that Milley furiously spent time sitting “in his office at the Pentagon, writing and rewriting…” According to the New Yorker, “there were short versions of the letter; there were long versions…” but Milley’s “preferred version” read like this in its entirety:

I regret to inform you that I intend to resign as your Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thank you for the honor of appointing me as senior ranking officer. The events of the last couple weeks have caused me to do deep soul-searching, and I can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country. I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.

Second, you are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people—and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people. The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.

Third, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal. All men and women are created equal, no matter who you are, whether you are white or Black, Asian, Indian, no matter the color of your skin, no matter if you’re gay, straight or something in between. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, or choose not to believe. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter what country you came from, what your last name is—what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue—the colors that my parents fought for in World War II—means something around the world. It’s obvious to me that you don’t think of those colors the same way I do. It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve.

And lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships. That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.

The letter is littered with traces of borderline illiteracy. Where to begin?

• Why does Milley write out “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” in full, twice in the span of three sentences?
• Why does Milley word his first allegation in the past tense — “you were doing great and irreparable harm”?
• Why does Milley start in numbering his grievances at “Second” without ever mentioning what his “First” problem is?
• Just how much fighting did Milley’s mom do in World War II?
• What an ungrammatical mess: “It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve”
• If “all men and women are created equal,” why is “Black” capitalized but not “white”?
• Seriously, what on Earth is going on in the last paragraph?

The whole thing reads  like it was written at a middle school grade level, and as a matter of fact, it was:

By way of comparison, here is how the same systems score a portion of President Trump’s inaugural address.

Just go over Milley’s unsent letter a few more times and be honest with yourself: If you were a high school English teacher grading this as an assignment, could you give it an A, or even a B+? And remember, this is a letter that Milley considered sending to the President of the United States. According to the New Yorker, that lump of textual goo was his favorite version among multiple drafts, which he spent several days working on.

In short, General Milley isn’t merely a mediocrity. He is a moron, a mental midget who engages with the world on the level of a teenager who has watched too many Aaron Sorkin TV shows. And embarrassingly (though appropriately) enough, Milley has two Ivy League degrees.

Milley is not some outlier exception. He is instead one of the best examples of a type that infests the senior levels of not just the military, but intelligence, law enforcement, foreign policy, and more. This type often thinks that it has no ideology at all; sometimes they even think they are conservative. But when faced with the slightest pressure at all, the only thing they actually believe is the nonsense in Milley’s letter — a moral vision derived from grade school history class and vague clichés they’ve heard incanted at one ceremony after another.

Even as the armed forces have embraced critical race theory and transgenderism, many American patriots have kept fetishizing the military because they view it as innately “conservative.” Milley’s letter, and every other humiliating detail of Monday’s article, shows that we must abandon this assumption. America’s top generals don’t just parrot contemporary wokeness. They are indistinguishable from the hysterical idiots who populate sites like Twitter and Reddit. The thought that they might be tasked with fighting and winning an actual war isn’t just amusing, it is terrifying.

If America is fortunate enough to have another presidential administration that puts America first, that administration cannot make the same mistake the first Trump term did. It cannot assume the best of a military leadership class that is hopelessly compromised and hopelessly inept. 

The first order of business for any America First administration, before ending any wars or passing any laws or even securing the border, must be reforming this institutions to its core. And this can only be done with a total teardown. A rogue military won’t be fixed by complaining about its antics on Twitter or by replacing replacing one fat Pentagon Pustule with another. It won’t be fixed by giving them a new set of orders; as the New Yorker reveals, these commanders feel empowered to ignore or defy orders they disagree with. The only fix is a total change of personnel in the positions of power. Fire every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and perhaps several rungs down as well, and remind the bloated sausages America calls “generals” that they serve America’s civilian leadership and not the other way around. The myth of a hyper-competent, hyper-patriotic military leadership caste must be punctured, for the American people to once again have the military they once did, and the one they deserve.

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