Fascists In the U.S. Military with Will Carless

Episode 170

Sun, Sep 10, 2023 2:48PM • 53:06

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

military, people, extremism, extremists, fascist, january 6th, austin, fascism, white supremacists, point, wc, report, veterans, protests, fact, years, effort, reforms, coup attempt, world

SPEAKERS

Will Carless, Mike Huckabee, Sam Goldman

Will Carless 00:00

There was an incredible study released earlier this year that showed that having a military background was the number one indicator of being involved in extremist activity in the United States. I think there are fascists in the military. We know that there are fascists in the military and that we know that there are fascists who’ve been kicked out of the military. The only reason that report is being suppressed as far as I know is because it says something that the administration doesn’t want people to see. Democracy only works if we’re all engaging in it, and it’s very easy not to. This stuff is really, really important. I just hope people take the time to understand it and to dig into it.

Sam Goldman 01:00

Welcome to Episode 170 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes analyzes, and stains against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Will Carless, national correspondent for USA Today, regarding his investigation published this summer into what the Pentagon did, or really did not do, two years after announcing reforms aimed at stamping out “extremism” in the military.

Sam Goldman 01:40

Thanks to everyone who goes the extra step and rates and reviews the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. But really, if you have Apple podcasts and you do it that way, please do it there. If you appreciate the show and want to help us reach more people who want to refuse that fascism, be a gem and go write a review and drop five stars wherever you get your pods. Tell podcast land why you listen, and they should too. Subscribe/follow so you never miss an episode. And of course, keep up all that great commenting, sharing on social media and the Youtubes. And I want to give thanks to our patrons and show sustainers. We really could not do this without you. Become a patron for as little as $2 a month over at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism.

Sam Goldman 02:28

So this week, let’s start off with some shout outs. First to the women of Mexico who, through courageous, relentless protests, decriminalized abortion nationwide this past week! May we follow their lead, join them in raising the green bandana for abortion rights, stepping outside the confines of “official” politics and filling the streets for legal abortion nationwide, now! Shout out to Paul Street, member of the Refuse Fascism Editorial Board and the Revcoms for protesting outside the Jason Aldean concert last night. Refuse Fascism delivered the message “No lynch mobs in or out of uniform! No good ‘ol boys preparing for civil war! In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!” Stay tuned for our socials @RefuseFascism for video of the event. We want to give cheers to the five people, including faith leaders, who, this past Thursday, September 7, chained themselves to equipment at the construction site of the Cop City project in Atlanta. They delivered a “People’s Injunction,” and we will have more coverage on this story soon.

Sam Goldman 03:38

We have to mention just some recent developments from this past week as they relate to the fascist threat in the United States before I share my chat with Will. First, take seriously this from Mike Huckabee in his opening monologue on last Saturday’s Huckabee program.

Mike Huckabee 03:58

Do you know how political opponents to those in power are dealt with in third world dictatorships banana republics and communist regimes? Well, it’s simple the people in power use their police agencies to arrest their opponents for made up crimes in an attempt to discredit them, bankrupt them, imprison them, exile them, or all of the above. And if you’re not paying attention, you may not realize that Joe Biden is using exactly those tactics to make sure that Donald Trump is not his opponent in 2024. Here’s the problem: If these tactics end up working to keep Trump from winning or even running in 2024. It is going to be the last American election that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets.

Sam Goldman 04:45

Nothing to see here, just Mike Huckabee another Republi-fascist threatening civil war if Trump doesn’t win in 2024. These fascists are fighting for a permanent win — unchallenged domination by any all means — to eliminate all their political enemies and all the people who they think have destroyed, “their country”. As Chauncey DeVega aptly underscored in a recent article for Salon: “If Donald Trump was a private citizen, and he was threatening his neighbors with violence and other harm, he would likely be put in jail or otherwise removed from society. But Donald Trump is not a regular person. He is a former president who commands the loyalty of tens of millions of people. When a person tells you who they are, believe them. That wisdom and warning most certainly applies to Trump and his MAGA-ites and the other Neo fascists and members of the white right. Denial will not save you, no matter how much you wish it would.” As we say on the show — and will continue to say — the times demand bold truth telling no matter how unpopular — struggle, not complacency. In related news, the Proud Boys’ supreme leader, Enrique Tarrio, was sentenced to 22 years in prison this week, the longest prison term handed out to any of the more than 1100 people so far prosecuted for the coup attempt on January 6th. A few other key leaders have also received sentences of over a decade in prison for their roles in the January 6th insurrection. As good as this accountability is, it’s important to take note that the Proud Boys haven’t grown to where they are through Tarrios’ visionary leadership, but instead as a necessary accessory to the larger fascist movement. Andy Campbell has a great piece up on HuffPost titled: Proud Boys didn’t just crash an election, they upended the next one. It’s linked in the show notes. This tweet from him really sums up a lot. He tweeted: “Five Proud Boy leaders are going to prison over Jan6, but the gang isn’t going away — nor is the violence they normalized within GOP politics. The political violence of Jan6 is already a threat to the next election and beyond.” I wouldn’t be doing my job as host of the show — and by job, I mean volunteer position.– if I didn’t also recommend listening to our shows’ interview with Andy that touched on their growth since January 6th and how the fascist gang handled their last leadership crisis. Check that out, it will be linked in the show notes.

Sam Goldman 07:02

To drive home the poignancy of this week’s interview, two of the Proud Boy leaders who were sentenced recently were veterans, and one, as Jeff Sharlet pointed out, received preferential treatment precisely for that. “17 years for Joe Biggs is way less than federal guidelines. In handing it down, Judge Kelly, a Trump appointee, admired Biggs’ military service, which should have led to a heavier sentence, not a lighter one. He used the training given him by the U.S. to try to overthrow it.” As the prosecutor pointed out in court, Biggs “acted as the tip of the spear” as the mob entered the Capitol and “throughout the attack maintained command over others.” Rhe Trump appointee did sentencing Judge, Kelly, also diminished Biggg’s sentence for his entirely see through veil of remorse — one which he immediately discarded after sentencing, telling an Infowars interviewer that he did nothing wrong and that Trump would pardon him once he came back to power.

Sam Goldman 08:34

We couldn’t run this episode without talking about the completely outrageous RICO charges and political prosecution Stop Cop City activists face. For over a year, activists have been mobilizing to stop the sprawling police training facility, the Atlanta Public Safety training and rightly labeled Cop City by the opposition. If built, Cop City would be the largest police training compound in this country, training police from around the world in militarized tactics. As Atlanta forest defenders has commented, “the construction of COP city and the destruction of the South River Forest have continued despite over 100,000 Atlanta residents signing a ballot initiative calling for a referendum on the issue. The city of Atlanta has fought the referendum with technical obstructions.” On January 10, Georgia State Police shot and killed Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran as they camped in the South River Forest to stop Cop City. This past Tuesday, September 5, Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr announced indictments against 61 cop city protesters on RICO and money laundering charges, accusing them of being part of a “criminal enterprise” to stop Cop City. These new charges are on top of the dozen Instead of domestic terrorism charges that have been heaped on those who have protested in opposition to Cop City, activists with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund have been indicted on 15 counts of money laundering for their work to provide bail money and legal aid for protesters. These are extremely ominous charges, clear acts of a massive political prosecution, and something that all who are concerned with fascism should not only pay attention to, not only sound the alarm about, but vigorously protest while defending those who are coming under attack. We urge people to read the indictments in full in addition to the Atlanta Community Press Collective’s coverage linked in the show notes. Take note of the retaliatory connection to the beautiful uprising for black lives, and the naming of anarchism, collectivism, mutual aid and protecting the environment at all costs as fundamental ideologies and practices that they are classifying as terrorism. Kiana Jones, a Stop Cop City organizer with Community Movement Builders — he’ll be on the show next week — noted in her interview on Democracy Now that “a very clear message was sent with this particular RICO indictment. We see that the data this indictment reads May 25, 2020, the date that George Floyd was murdered — the date that people all across the country stood up and said: Enough is enough — we don’t stand for police terror, excessive violence and brutality and this senseless killings of innocent black people around this country. Since that date, this country has been upended by governments across the nation trying to build Cop Cities in order to quell protests because the government is simply upset that people seek to oppose and use their First Amendment right to protest when we see injustice coming from those in authority.” What the indictment deems criminal is completely dystopian: first Amendment protected activities such as distributing flyers being a legal observer at a music festival, other lawful activities such as bailing people out for protests, labeled as part of a nefarious enterprise. As noted earlier, we’ll be covering more on this story in future episodes.

Sam Goldman 12:15

While on the topic of nefarious, Elon Musk has been continuing to cross the boundaries from conspiracy theorist to outright anti Semite in a campaign he has now adopted to “Ban the ADL”, referring to the Anti Defamation League. There has been a lot of really good reporting covering Elon Musk’s anti semitism and platforming of anti Semites, and we’re not going to go into it here. Maybe we’ll do it in a future episode. Our resident billionaire “free speech absolutist” has taken up the slogan from the fascist sections of Twitter — which is becoming more and more dominant — in response to the ADL seemingly effective campaign to get companies to stop buying advertising space on a platform that caters to anti Semites. Musk has not only used the hashtag, but in advanced anti semitic tropes in his tweets, all the while being the one responsible for unbanning actual Nazis and other fascists of various stripes, and subsequently, following and retweeting a number of them. A wave of articles and tweets comparing Musk to Henry Ford has followed and is quite apt. Some have used progressives criticism of the ADL to diminish the importance of what’s happening here, or even say it’s a good thing. But the danger of this is glaring. Today, we are seeing open anti semitism on a scale beyond what we’ve seen in decades. It would be wrong to see this situation and respond by using a group’s Jewish identity to shield them from any and all criticism. But the flip side of that is that anti semitic or racist or misogynistic or transphobic attacks against anyone cannot be ignored, let alone supported. With that, here’s my interview with Will.

Sam Goldman 14:05

More than two years ago, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin launched what was a sweeping initiative that was instigated by the January 6th insurrection with the goal of rooting out the threat of extremism that was rampant throughout the United States Armed Forces. But today, the military has almost nothing to show for its efforts, a USA Today investigation has found. To discuss this, I am glad to have the help of Will Carless, National Correspondent for USA Today. Will covers extremism and Emerging Issues nationwide for USA Today. He has done impressive investigative reporting on white supremacy and what we on the show would classify as fascism within the US military. Thanks so much, Will, for coming on.

Will Carless 14:55

Thanks for having me on.

Sam Goldman 14:57

On the show. We do talk about The fascist movement that we see. We use that term simply because it’s more precise in terms of what we’re looking at and what we’re addressing; a movement that foments and relies upon xenophobia white supremacy, the most overt misogyny, and that it’s doing so in service of consolidating power, and once power would be consolidated, it would eliminate any civil or democratic rights — the overt rule through brute force, that is kind of what we’re looking at. And that’s why we use that term. [WC: Yup] So that’s why I just, I think that’s a good place to start, because extremism can be a euphemism for a lot of things, I think. [WC: Right] And that’s why we need to just start with that language to guide our conversation forward. [WC: Sure, yeah.] As the Biden administration came into office, Defense Secretary Austin announced this initiative to investigate and root out radical white supremacy in the ranks of the military. I’m hoping that you could talk a little bit more about what compelled this.

Will Carless 16:07

The months after the January 6th insurrection, when it was becoming increasingly clear just how many people who had been involved in that storming of the Capitol had military backgrounds, or indeed, were currently serving in the military, it’d sort of become so glaringly stark, that there was a very strong correlation there, that Defense Secretary Austin really kind of grabbed the bull by the horns and said: We’re going to acknowledge, really, for the first time ever, that this is a problem, and that we need to do something about it. It’s hard to overstate just how revolutionary that was. I mean, we’re talking about an institution that traditionally, it’s been extremely kind of toxic, and extremely taboo to ever suggest — even suggest — that there is a relationship between extremism and the military. And that, of course, some elements of society, remains to this day, right, and that’s part of the reason that I get into my story. But what Austin was saying that was so extraordinary was he was saying, look, there’s clearly a problem here. And we need to get on top of it. And we need to really institute some changes that were both — the way I categorized it, my story is that we’ll stop extremists entering the military, that will find extremists who are in the military, and will protect veterans and people kind of transitioning out of the military from being recruited by extremist groups. So it was this kind of like real wholesale package to tackle this problem that anybody who knew anything about extremism had been talking about for decades, but that had never really been acknowledged, at any high level, let alone by the Secretary of Defense or the U.S. military.

Sam Goldman 17:45

Before I hit record, you know, you were mentioning about the long history of there being this white supremacist, violent, anti government from the right, presence within the military for some time. How do we know this?

Will Carless 18:02

We know it because the data shows us that. There was a incredible study released earlier this year that showed that having a military background was the number one indicator of being involved in extremist activity in the United States. Now, I want to stress a couple of things: Extremists are a rare. There are not that many extremists — at least in terms of the way that I define it, in the terms of the way that most sort of academics define it. Having said that, there are millions and millions of people serving in the US military. The reason that this is so important to acknowledge and take stock of is that when you’re serving in the military, you have access to all sorts of knowledge, weapons, other things that regular James and Joe’s don’t have. This sort of like a magnifying factor that makes it particularly important — that like every military affiliated person who is an extremist is kind of much more potentially dangerous than just an everyday person who doesn’t have the kind of training and special knowledge that they have. That’s why this is particularly so important. To your point about just the kind of taboo nature of like acknowledging that this is an issue. Nobody likes to criticize the military, right. Politicians, people in power, do not like to criticize the military, because it’s not a popular stance to have. The U.S. military is one of the most trusted and venerated organizations in the world — particularly in this country. So any sort of notion that there’s any kind of weakness or any kind of flaw within the military is something that’s just like a third rail for politicians. So that goes back to my point that for Secretary Austin to really grasp on this was just such a revolutionary thing when it happened.

Sam Goldman 19:45

I really appreciate that reminder. It is the most powerful military in the world. If you see that as a good thing or not, that is what it is. So I think that that’s an important thing to underscore. Moving to look at the way that the January 6th insurrection helped — you might see this as spur — the need to focus on — or compel, in my perspective — it was those in power felt compelled that they had to look at this, even if they didn’t want to, even if it was unpopular to look at extremism in the military, this forced their hand a bit, so I wanted to get into that a little bit. I believe 10% — this number might have changed, but 10% — of those who were arrested for involvement in the January 6th coup attempt were veterans compared to something like 6% of the adult population of the U.S., with studies showing a five fold increase in of “extremist” violence in recent years. You have Ashley Babbitt, Stewart Rhodes, the Proud Boys that are getting 15-17 year sentences last week were all veterans. In the aftermath of January 6th, the fact that whether a person has a military background is one of the biggest factors, as you said [WC: The biggest factor.] — is the biggest factor — in identifying their likelihood for participating in a terrorist attack. This has, as your report talks about — spurred the military to recommend a number of reforms to address this problem. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how Austin’s initiative aimed to address this problem.

Will Carless 21:23

To your first point about just how this kind of became such a glaringly obvious thing that had to be grasped, that’s reflected just in the fact that this extraordinary effort was launched. It was an acknowledgment that this relationship can no longer be ignored. Let’s also not forget that this followed on from two or three years in which the so called militia movement in the United States had been growing in visibility. The Oathkeepers went from being this kind of vaguely known about organization — that I kind of was writing definitions for, like five years ago, you know, because there weren’t definitions out there — not very good ones — to a household name. Everybody knew who they were. There were stickers all over people’s cars and everything like that. I think it wasn’t just January 6th. It was an overall growth in the extreme far right, particularly the anti government movement, spurred on, of course, by former president who had come into office under the idea that the entire federal government was corrupt, and that he was going to clean it all up. All of that was wrapped up together. It wasn’t just January 6th. There was just kind of a general acknowledgement by people in the Biden administration, that this was something that needed to be taken seriously. At the same time, you also had President Biden standing up and saying that far right violence was one of the major threats to American society, whereas Trump had refused to acknowledge that far right violence even existed. It was a really significant turning point for how that problem is perceived. But as far as the reforms that Austin wanted to bring in, he started off with what were called four immediate actions. These were, first of all, to institute a study of extremism, basically taking a look at how bad the extremism problem is in the U.S. military — which, as my story found, that study was finished a year and a half ago now — it was commissioned, it was done, it was finished, and it’s sitting somewhere in the Pentagon, and they haven’t released it yet. So, that’s kind of number one. He also called for changes to what are called — they’re kind of like the accession documents — it’s called the service member transition checklist. What this basically is, is when people move from the military into veteran status, they have to kind of undergo this process where they go through this transition check. They’re basically read a bunch of stuff and given a bunch of paperwork. He wanted to change that paperwork so that it warned veterans about the dangers of extremists and the dangers of extremism groups, approaching them and trying to recruit them. On the other end of the spectrum, at the beginning of the process of joining the military, he wanted to standardize screening questionnaires — wanted to change, like when you go into a recruitment office, and you go to apply to join the Army, or the Navy, or the Marines, or whatever it is, to have those questionnaires include questions about affiliation with extremist groups, about extremist activity. A lot of people are kind of critical of that, because they’re like: Well, who’s gonna write: Yeah, I’m a Nazi on their application form? right. But the point wasn’t that. The point was that if somebody failed to acknowledge that they had been a member of say, the Rise Above movement, or Atomwaffen Division and then joined the military, and then they found out that that had happened, then the military could use military law to go back and say: You lied on your application form, you’re out. They’re gonna court martial you or just kick you out. Then, the last thing was to change the definition of extremism. The military rewrote its definition of extremism in the months after that first memo. I remember the day, it was April 9, 2021, just a couple of months after the insurrection, that Austin started off with those four main things. We can kind of get in the weeds on this, but the basic kind of too long didn’t read version is that he also created a commission that was tasked with making sure that this stuff happened, but also just generally charged with assessing the problem of extremism in the military and making recommendations to stamp it out. This commission met throughout 2021 and issued a report at the end of 2021 in which there were an additional 16 or so recommendations that they put out, that kind of both broke down the recommendations that Austin to come up with originally — it kind of made them more granular and more specific — but also came up with some new things that they wanted the military to do. So you ended up with, essentially, it boils down to like twenty deliverables; twenty things that the military was told to do to try and solve this problem.

Will Carless 23:15

That’s what he proposed, and this was in — he, being Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, this was right after he took office — January 2021. A big part of it was this audit “extremism” in the military, along with the other measures that you just walked us through, designed to thwart fascists from entering the military, engaging with fascist propaganda. You investigated these measures and found, to put it nicely, some serious shortcomings in their implementation. Can you tell us about what happened, or what didn’t?

Will Carless 26:29

I think it’s good if I kind of explain my methodology. What I did was, I looked at that initial memo, I looked at the report, I read this report with a fine tooth comb, I pulled out of it these 20 deliverables. I then sat down and wrote a very detailed email to to the Department of Defense saying: Here’s what you said you were gonna do, what have you done? Come back to me and tell me what you’ve done. They then took months and months, during which they said, you know, we’re investigating this, we’re working on this, during which I had sources in the Department of Defense who are contacting me and saying, like, this is really caused a real stir here, like, basically, you know, you’re calling us on this and we haven’t done any of this stuff. But essentially — I’ve got to be very careful how I describe this — they came back to me with definitive answers on a couple of these things, and some vagaries on some other of these things, and then just no answer at all, on most of these deliverables. So my conclusion from that was, there are a couple of things we can point out that they have done, there are a few things that they’ve sort of started, but they haven’t really finished them, and we’re not quite sure what’s going on with them. And then there’s a bunch of stuff that they just have not done, or at least cannot show me that they’ve done. And so that’s kind of where it comes down to. It’s like most of it, they didn’t do, some of it they did, and a few things. It’s not quite clear.

Sam Goldman 26:46

What was done?

Will Carless 26:49

They changed the definition of extremism. No one doubts that. You can look up the code, and it’s different to what it wasn’t. It’s now much more wide ranging, and much more clear. It actually is quite significant. I’d say it’s probably broader than my definition or, you know, what most academics would see as extremism. By the way, I think it’s probably good in the military. It says things like it’s considered extremist activity to just like a Facebook post that is posted by an extremist group, for example. It’s not okay for you to do that if you’re in the military anymore — post, I think it was May, or something, 2021, that they’ve changed this definition. As far as the study, as I said earlier, they’ve done the study, they just haven’t released it. It’s just literally sitting there. I bug them every couple of weeks, and I say: When are you going to release this report? Because we’d really like to know how bad the extremism problem is in the US military. And so. apparently, by the way, would you, which is why you commissioned it. But you haven’t released it, and so nobody knows. And then as far as the other stuff, that kind of the screening forms, there was some confusion. In addition to asking the DOD, I put out a public information request to all the branches of the military saying, please send me your screening questionnaires, because you were supposed to standardize them according to these rules. And literally, I got an email back from the Marines, for example, saying we don’t know what you’re talking about. We don’t know what a Screening Questionnaire is. And I said: Well, I don’t know what else to call them other than what the Secretary of Defense called them in his own memo. Here it is. Here’s a document with it on there. Do you have these? I’m still waiting to hear from them. It should be said, the commission that I mentioned earlier — this very, very smart, very hard working, diligent group of people that really did a top notch effort in terms of trying to figure out whether this was being done or not — hey did note in their report that there was some standardization done across the board. That did add questions to screening questionnaires along the lines of: Are you a Nazi? kind of thing. Are you an extremist? Have you engaged in in extremist activity? That does appear to have happened to some extent. And then when it comes to the veteran stuff, the kind of transitioning people out of the military, very little appears to have been done on that. They started that conversation. They had some meetings, and then it just appears to kind of fizzled out and gone away. As you mentioned earlier — and as we should make very, very clear — when we talk about extremism and in relation to military service, it’s overwhelmingly veterans that get involved in extremism. And it’s overwhelmingly, we should also say, veterans who have been pretty far removed from service — like they may have been 10, even 20 years ago, have served in the military, then get involved in extremism. But that connection is, is much stronger than when you talk about active duty serving military. There are active duty serving military who are involved with extremism. They get caught all the time, and there are plots that are uncovered every month, pretty much in different parts of the military. But we’re overwhelmingly talking about veterans. So the fact that they just didn’t do any of that stuff or don’t appear to have done any of the veterans stuff is really kind of disappointing to a lot of people.

Will Carless 28:33

The internal audit that you’ve talked about that gets into how widespread racist and fascist sympathies are in the military has been finished, and it’s still not released. Correct? Just to confirm,

Will Carless 31:17

Yeah. It’s done. You and I paid for it. Everybody listening to this podcast, as taxpayers paid for it to be done. There was a company that was brought in. I don’t know how much they were paid, because they weren’t telling me, but they were paid an awful lot of money to go and look at a problem that the Secretary of Defense asked them to do more than two years ago, saying this is a vital thing that we need to know. They know it. And they won’t tell us. It’s as simple as that.

Sam Goldman 31:42

Why do you think that is?

Will Carless 31:43

That’s a really good question. I don’t know. I’ve talked to various people about this. I think there’s a few different answers to that question. I don’t want to get too into the weeds. But like, if we look at the discussion that’s currently going on in Congress, right now, we’ve kind of gone back into a world where discussing extremism in the military is a taboo subject again. We’re seeing that in Republican led congressional committees that are basically holding up funding for the military and getting rid of any effort to stamp out extremism in the military, basically, because they state that they don’t believe it’s a problem where it’s such a vanishingly small problem that they don’t need to do anything about it. I say that because if you’re President Biden, or even Lloyd Austin, right, then you know that this study is out there, let’s say it’s possible that this study says: Yes, extremism is vanishingly small in the US military. You don’t want to release that study, at the same time that these powerful GOP committee members are saying exactly that, right. You don’t want to give them any more ammunition to say, look, this is such a small problem, you know, why are we even talking about it? That’s one possibility. The other possibility is that the study shows that there’s absolutely a massive problem with extremism in the US military. You don’t really want that to come out either, because that is extremely controversial. It’s going to cause a huge brouhaha in Congress and elsewhere and it’s going to give the Republicans a chance to paint Biden and Austin as being anti military. They’re going to say: Look, look, our biased these people are, they’ve put out this report saying that there’s extremism in the military. So look, again, we’ve paid for this study, we’ve done it, it’s vitally important. There are researchers across the country who would love to take a look at what that report states, and I think, absolutely, it should be released to the U.S. public. I don’t think there’s any excuse not to, regardless of what the political repercussions might be. We have a right to know what they found out.

Sam Goldman 33:43

Yeah, I think that there is absolutely a right to know, that extends beyond the fact, as you said, that it was paid for, that it’s done. There might be instances where something is finished, and there’s a need to do more before it comes out. I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs.

Will Carless 33:59

They haven’t argued that, right.

Sam Goldman 34:03

There’s been no case made. [WC: Yeah] It’s just been kept from people. It’s an incredibly dangerous situation in my book to have that information and sit on it. It’s also come out that there was/is wide spread sympathy for the January 6th coup attempt participants within the FBI, among other places. Have you uncovered any evidence along these lines to show why the audit is being suppressed?

Will Carless 34:32

As far as this study is concerned, it’s purely inside the military, as far as I know. The only reason that report is being suppressed, as far as I know, is because it says something that the administration doesn’t want people to see. What I mean is like they haven’t come back and said: Hey, we’re still collecting data. They haven’t come back and said: Hey, we still need to do an edit. Or: Hey, we’ve got information from like three quarters of this, but we need to finish off the last quarter. Which is typically what the bureaucracies will do to excuse the fact that they haven’t released a report that they said they’d do in a year. They haven’t made any of those excuses. They’ve just said: We’ve done it, and we’ve got it, and we haven’t released it. Which means that there has to be a reason why not.

Sam Goldman 35:16

My understanding is that there were also some moves towards reforming the department of Homeland Security along similar lines to Austin’s plans for the military that have totally fizzled out. Is that correct? [WC: Yeah] And is there more that you can talk about that?

Will Carless 35:32

I don’t know a huge amount about that. I know that a few weeks ago, a group of congress people wrote DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas a letter asking what’s up? Essentially saying: Hey, you know, you guys were gonna do all these reforms too, what’s up with that? What happened to them? As far as I can tell, they haven’t received a response back. And they had asked for a response, I believe it was by the end of July. They’re still waiting on that. That’s not USA Today journalists asking. That’s a group of senior Congress, people asking, and they haven’t, as far as I know, received a response. So yeah, there is sort of generally this acknowledgement among certain members of Congress that like: Hey, let’s not lose track of this effort. We started off this effort, we were all on the same page two years ago that this was a problem, and we needed to deal with it. Let’s keep it going, please, and let’s not let it get steamrollered or kind of pushed to the side by current events or whatever. There is that concurrent effort going on, for sure.

Sam Goldman 36:33

I think I know what your read and this is going to be, but I wanted to ask you while I have you. A few weeks, though, there was a report of abandoned of Neo Nazis being kicked out of active duty military, including a guy who had a Hitler poster up in his barracks at Camp Pendleton. [WC: Yeah, Camp Pendleton, mmhmm.] Is this really how bad it has to get for them to be labeled as white supremacists, anti Semites — you have to put up an actual poster of Hitler and that’s what will tip them off to you

Will Carless 37:04

In your military, pay for supply barracks! I mean, yeah, when I read that, I was like, that’s absolutely bonkers. I do think it’s fair to say that for the lack of kind of institutional change, there certainly does appear to be an increase in terms of institutional knowledge and acceptance of the fact that extremists have to be kicked out of the military, and that they will tell the public about that. I’ve been writing about this stuff for seven years or so, and in that time, the number of cases like this that have come out of the military has increased exponentially — that we hear about. We’re at the point now, where the Marines are regularly kicking people out for extremist activity, and issuing press releases about it and telling us about it. Whereas, five or six years ago, it was just like: No, there’s no extremists in the military. Like,: No, go look elsewhere, you don’t need to look over here. I did a story, a couple of years ago now, about the Navy and the fact they had found something like 13 real hardcore, extremist, like Neo Nazis. What they had done was to quietly dismiss them from the military, as opposed to doing a full blown kind of court martial that might have resulted in these people going to jail or being taken off the streets, or at least having a public record that would go with them. What they’ve done instead was to quietly push them out the door and send them out into the world, where incidentally, some of them then went on to commit heinous crimes. I made that point, because I think that was very much the ethos in the military for a long time. I’m not a military reporter, but I do cover this part of it. I do think most military reporters would agree that we’ve moved into a more transparent, open paradigm than we were in before. By no means perfect, but at least we find out about the guy who had the Hitler flag on his wall, right. Whereas I don’t think we would have found out about that two or three years ago.

Sam Goldman 38:57

Yeah, I think it’s just disturbing to see. Okay, we hear about those instances, you see the rise of those instances, those press releases, and that’s disturbing. But when you see how overt those cases were — how the blatant those cases were, there is the question of: Is that how far it has to go for them to be tipped off? Obviously, I don’t know the answer to that, but based on the fact that they’re doing press releases for those things that it is — problematic is not the right word, right. You know, we don’t know because a public report isn’t available, but we get this sense, because we do know about the Mike Flynns, we do know that this is a military that is infected with those who side with fascists. We don’t know the extent to it. I don’t have all the data, but we know that it’s through the command, and so there is a deeply troubling situation that is only exacerbated by the fact that we don’t know everything — in the sense of this being the largest imperialist power in the world. We’re not going to know everything

Will Carless 39:59

There’s data on this too. They regularly survey active duty military. They’re asked to what extent have you seen evidence — like, I’m just reading a story here in the Military Times. The Military Times does a survey, I think every year, maybe every few years, and this one from 2019 found that 36% of troops who responded to the survey have seen evidence of white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military. That was a significant rise from the year before when it was only 22%. So, there’s data that shows that this is a problem in active duty military. Anybody can go and ask anybody they know who has served in the military, particularly people of color, and ask them: Did you see evidence of extremism in the military? I’ve personally done that with people that I know, and come back: Of course, they’re Neo Nazis in the military. Of course, there are. I mean, there are others groups in civilian life, too, but the fact that for so long, these groups were sort of allowed to go under the radar is pretty alarming. Part of this effort that I wrote about is defining what extremism was. There was a very vague definition for extremism in the U.S. military code. That’s much more clear now. Whether that’s part of the reason why these cases are coming out now, and they are being prosecuted, and they’re being court martialed. And there are documents being released to the public and everything else, I don’t know. But those two things do kind of coincide.

Sam Goldman 41:24

We had Jeff Sharlet on not so long ago, and he made what I thought was an important point, that the threat of civil war doesn’t come simply from deranged fascist thugs with guns. as dangerous as that may be — I’m talking about like the Proud Boys or Oathkeepers — but it arises in large part from the possibility that in a political crisis, like a contested election, or a coup attempt, sections of the military may not know whose orders to follow, or may choose to fall in line with a fascist political leadership. So I think it’s possible that Austin was never serious about this initiative in the first place, and this was all just a show. But it also seems possible that there is significant institutional pushback and obstruction to rooting out violent white supremacists. Which, in my opinion, might be even more alarming. For ordinary decent people, we can understand the danger and the gravity of having this metastasizing cancer of fascism throughout our society, but it’s especially dangerous to have those among those members of society that are armed and trained in the use of ruthless violence. [WC: Sure] But what do you think is going on with these people in power who clearly have some inkling of the threat, like Lloyd Austin, but who are acting in very limited and honestly impotent ways, issuing audits, proclamations that don’t ever get acted upon?

Will Carless 42:47

I personally believe that there are very, very few bonafide extremists as a percentage of the US military. I think it’s probably equivalent to the number of bonafide extremists in the general public, maybe slightly elevated for various reasons. But I still think that it is an extraordinary minority. I think there’s probably a more significant number of people who flirt with racist ideologies, who flirt with, you know, fascist ideologies, who flirt with extremist ideologies of various different stripes, but who aren’t real dyed in the wool extremists who would sort of take sides in a conflict. I think that number is very, very small as a percentage, and I think that the pushback against this effort comes from the conservative side of government. It’s GOP congresspeople in general who like to say: There’s no such thing as far right extremism, there are no white supremacists. You know, Roger Stone told a radio show I used to work for there are no white supremacists in America. He just openly said that. There’s a very clear reason why they do that, it’s because those people represent the very worst faction of the belief that they believe in, right. They’re the very worst and most distasteful and most disliked and distrusted faction of the right. So if you’re a mainstream conservative, it’s easier to pretend that those people don’t exist than it is to acknowledge them, but to say: Okay, I know they believe in a lot of what we believe in, but they’re not us. They’re not the same as us. So I think that that’s more what this obfuscation effort is about. To be clear, I do think that there is a genuine obfuscation effort underway to limit the sort of perceived scope of this problem and to handle it. I’m sure that if I could put on magic glasses and see what Lloyd Austin was up against and what he has met in trying to get these things done, I’m sure I would see an enormous amount of conservative backlash and pushback against it. In fact, that’s been detailed by other very good reporters who’ve written it out this subject who have talked exactly about that; about the amount of pushback that these reforms got from inside the military, and from inside Congress. But to your point, I think that that pushback is more about politics and public relations and aesthetics than it is about bona fide, like, we need to protect the fascists in the military. I genuinely just don’t believe that that’s the case. I think there are fascists in the military. We know that there are fascists in the military, and that we know that there are fascists who’ve been kicked out of the military, but the mere fact that they’re being kicked out, and the mere fact that the rules are tightening up to stop them from serving in the military and to get rid of them if they are serving in the military — however, incrementally and slowly, those rules are changing — sort of shows that the effort is gradually inching forwards. Not going as quickly as it should be. But there are some changes being made.

Sam Goldman 45:55

I think that there is a situation that the Lloyd Austins and others are in — they’re between a rock and a hard place of trying to keep this going, to keep this military going, to keep this empire going, in a way that is based on forcible exploitation while trying to expunge maybe the worst oppressors from their enterprise, while keeping it going. I think that there is contention there, including what potential that could open up if they were to, even at minimum, expose the worst of the worst. What that would open them to within the ranks of the military, what that would open up to within those in political power, whether it be Congress or otherwise. In this country, where you talked about the military is so revered in a way that’s really uniquely American, I think that is a thorny place. And also what that might open up in terms of how they’re looked at in the world, in the international perspective, especially with the situation in Ukraine, being such an effort.

Will Carless 47:07

As a Brit, and as somebody who spent most of my life not living in the United States, I can say, the US military hasn’t made a lot of friends around the world — around the rest of the world, right, and is certainly not in any way revered. There are some countries, obviously, where military action has been massively important in protecting those countries, but there’s an awful lot of places where they don’t view the US military as a positive force whatsoever, and that’s just a fact. In terms of the scope of what my article’s about, my article is about an acknowledgement, however brief it was, and to whatever extent it still remains, that the very worst of extremists exist within the military and within the veteran community. Just that acknowledgement was so significant, and led to a change in definitions, a report into extremism in the US military that appears to have been done in good faith, that does exist, that I have to hope is going to see the light of day at some point, but also led to a number of proposed reforms that at the very least, journalists like me can point out and say: You said you were going to do that, and you haven’t done it. That’s kind of all we can do at this stage, is we can say there was a moment in which you acknowledged that this was a problem, started the reforms going, and the reforms appear to have all but stopped. I think it’s important that everyday people, taxpayers, everybody, knows that that’s happening. I’m going to continue to report on that until it changes. And if it changes, great, we’ll keep reporting on it, but that’s certainly not where we’re at right now.

Sam Goldman 48:51

I want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us your expertise, your time, your perspective. I wanted to just give you the opportunity, if there was anything that we didn’t talk about that’s related to this story that you wanted to touch on, I just wanted to give you the opportunity to do so.

Will Carless 49:09

This is a very dense, detailed story. It’s got a lot of moving parts. It can get pretty dry. I think that the important elements of this are in the details. One example I’ll just bring out that my reporting found was this commission that was tasked with looking at the reforms that were already underway and suggesting more, basically said: Look, what we should do is we should set up this kind of supercharged internal affairs unit within the US military where people can report instances of extremism to. So that 36% or whatever of people in the military who are seeing extremism would have an independent place that they could go without fear of repercussions to report extremism that could then act upon those, investigate them, and take action if necessary. That just never happened. That was just a reform that was very well thought out, they talked to all the people involved, all the stakeholders, and they said we should do this, and then they didn’t do it. My story is full of examples like that. I would just urge anybody who cares about this and wants to have a kind of working knowledge about different parts of what’s going on, spend the 20 minutes or whatever it takes to read my story. It breaks it all down for you, and if there’s any other particular element of that, that you’re interested in, hit me up, let me know, because I will continue to dig on it. And I continue to dig on it, but democracy only works if we’re all engaging in and t it and it’s very easy not to. This stuff is really, really important. I just hope people take the time to understand it and to dig into it.

Sam Goldman 50:44

Folks can check the show notes for Will’s story. And if folks want to read more from you, connect with you, where should they go?

Will Carless 50:55

Twitter’s the obvious place or X, or whatever it’s called now, @WillCarless or so if you just google Will Carless USA Today then that will take you to my author page where all of my stuff is.

Sam Goldman 51:06

Thanks again. Will.

Will Carless 51:07

Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Sam Goldman 51:09

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Got thoughts or questions on this episode? We want to hear em. Ideas for topics or guests? Yes, please send them to us. Have a skill you think could help? We want to know all about it. Reach me at the site previously known as Twitter, @SamBGoldman, drop me a line at [email protected], we’re on Threads we’re on Bluesky we’re on Mastodon and lots of other places. Find us @RefuseFascism. Hit us up. You can also leave a voicemail, see the show notes, click and you’ll be sent to a button where you can leave us a voicemail and that’d be awesome. We’d love to hear from you. Want to support the show? It’s simple. Top way to show us some love is by rating and reviewing the show on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice. And, of course, follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode. Become a patron to support our pod and content creation to help people understand and act to stop the fascist threat. Give today at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism or visit RefuseFascism.org and hit that donate button. Thanks always to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each show. How cool is that? So be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!