Occasionally I will read something very conservative or maybe controversial. About 2 weeks ago I read an active duty General reported there was no white supremacy movement in the military. I can’t find the article now. Happens all the time.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3944903/posts
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the panel’s top Republican, told the hearing at the outset that “it is important to point out that we lack any concrete evidence that violent extremism is as rife in the military as some commentators claim.”
Rogers said “extremism was a factor” in the separation of only nine soldiers from the U.S. Army in 2020, and he noted that “since 2018, 17 Marines have been separated for extremism, gang or separatist activities.
“That’s 17 out of 200,000. While I agree that this number ought to be zero, this is far from the largest military justice issue facing our armed services,” Rogers said.
He also told the committee that “earlier this year, 151 overwhelmingly liberal organizations, including Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, and SPLC Action [Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund], urged Congress not to expand domestic terrorism charges.”
“The organizations said, ‘We urge you to oppose any new domestic terrorism charge, the creation of a list of designated domestic terrorist organizations, or other expansion of existing terrorism-related authorities,’” Rogers said.
Besides Berry, the committee heard from only two other witnesses, Dr. Audrey Kurth Cronin, an American University Professor of International Security, and Lecia Brooks, Chief of Staff for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a liberal advocacy group that has often been criticized by conservatives for defining “extremism” so broadly as to include conventional political groups that clearly are not.
The newest Republican member of the committee, Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) pointed out that “recently the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, NPR, and the New Yorker magazine, just to name a few, skewered the SPLC for, among other things, corruption, harassment, racism and a widening credibility gap.”
Fallon also noted that Cronin claimed 37 of those arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol were either U.S. military veterans or reservists.
“There are 18 million U.S. military veterans. Thirty-four were rioters. This means that 17,999,966 of us were not. That’s one out of 529,000,” Fallon said.