EPISODE 144: “Wokeness: A Grave Risk to America’s Military”

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to the Bill Walton Show, featuring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, artists and thinkers. Fresh perspectives on money, culture, politics and human flourishing. Interesting people, interesting things.

Bill Walton (00:24):

Welcome to the Bill Walton Show. I’m Bill Walton.

Bill Walton (00:29):

Today, I want to talk about a growing threat to the American military, something we’ve now all come to call wokeness and it’s capable of doing what no foreign enemy could ever do, which is to fracture the world’s greatest armed forces from within, through divisive political indoctrination and controls. Wokeness imposes the resentful mindset of an extremist’s view onto of the vast majority and it has infected the Pentagon.

Bill Walton (01:04):

It didn’t simply emerge from Joe Biden and his defense secretary Lloyd Austin, no, it’s been metastasizing for years and we need to address the problem. With me to talk about it today are two men who know a lot about the problem and what to do about it. Lieutenant General retired, William G. Boykin, one of the original members and combat commander of the US Army’s elite Delta Forces. Later, Jerry Boykin commanded all the Army’s Green Berets as well as the Special Warfare Center and School and served for four years as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Dr. Michael Waller, Mike, is the senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy, where his areas of concentration are propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare and subversion. Mike holds a PhD in international security affairs and got his start as an insurgent with the Nicaraguan Contras. Mike, welcome back.

Mike Waller (02:10):

Good to be back with you, Bill.

Bill Walton (02:11):

Jerry, before we dive into our main stage event, you’re doing something very important. You’re leading the initiative that we’re calling the Retired Flag Officers for America. What’s that about?

General Boykin (02:22):

Yeah, I’m not sure that anybody’s leading it. We just are sort of coalescing together and Flag Officers for America is a coalition of retired flag officers from all the services to include the Coast Guard. And we feel that our oath to the Constitution of the United States had no expiration date on it and as retired flag officers we still have a responsibility to do what we can to support and defend the Constitution. And what we see happening in America today has taken us down a path of absolute destruction of our Constitution, destruction of our way of life and destruction of the liberties that our founding fathers left us when they wrote that Constitution. We are doing what we can to make a difference. We back at the end of May, we wrote a letter, an open letter and we outlined those things that we think are very problematic for our way of life here.

General Boykin (03:29):

And prior to that letter in May, we had written one in September of last year, 317 of us signed it. And it outlined how we felt that this was the most important election in the history of America and that is because of this Marxist movement that has grown, has gotten real credibility, real legs, real influence in every element of our society. And what we were trying to point out in the September letter was if this election doesn’t go the right way, here’s the things you ought to look out for. And those things, Bill, have come to pass and are in the process of, I think reaching fruition in some cases. And this Marxist movement is very dangerous and that’s what we’ve tried to caution the American public about. Now I think they’re seeing it.

Bill Walton (04:28):

315 or so signed but I think it probably reflects the belief of a lot more of the retired flag officers, doesn’t it? Is this a prevalent feeling among everybody that served in the military? Or is this…

General Boykin (04:43):

Yeah, it does. There are certainly far more than just the 317 that signed back in September that feel the way we do. But there are those who believe that, and I don’t agree with them, but believe that they should stay out of the political arena, they should stay out of controversial things as retired generals. Those of us who signed that do not feel that way. We think that we have a responsibility. In fact, we have an obligation to get engaged and then you certainly have some who are making big money on boards of corporate boards and they are not going to speak out and that’s sad but it’s the choice that they’ve mad.

Bill Walton (05:35):

Because if we have a woke Pentagon, we also have woke corporations. And we’ve done a couple shows on that. That’s a problem that we need to get in some more. Mike, define woke. Define what it is that we’re up against here.

Mike Waller (05:52):

Woke is a pretty loose term but it really stands for an extremist, intolerant point of view that’s constantly changing. You can’t appease it, you can’t please it, you can’t compromise with it. It’s absolutist and if you disagree with it at all or don’t go along, the woke people will destroy you, they’ll destroy you personally, they’ll destroy you professionally, they will ruin your family life, they will make sure that you can never advance in any places where they have influence.

Bill Walton (06:26):

And is that critical? Is that the same thing as critical race theory? Or is critical race theory a part of that? What is it? And how is it manifesting inside the Pentagon? Because this is not something that just happened overnight.

Mike Waller (06:39):

No, it took decades to gestate and to develop. Wokeness itself or the word woke is not necessarily an ideological definition like critical race theory or cultural Marxism. It’s more of an attitude and an approach and a way of life, a way of functioning. It embraces all that extremism, Marxism, cultural Marxism, to have the fight not between social classes but between cultural groups and ethnic groups and all those other types of intolerance. You can embrace those radical issues and not be woke. You can say “I’m a cultural Marxist but I think we should have a good debate about it.” That’s not woke. It’s when they often don’t admit they’re cultural Marxists.

Bill Walton (07:27):

I don’t think cultural Marxist want to have a good debate about it. I don’t think so.

Mike Waller (07:31):

Well, you might get some scholars somewhere or somebody supposedly.

Bill Walton (07:33):

You’re giving them all the credit. Somebody somewhere might.

Mike Waller (07:35):

Yeah, somebody like cultural Marxist might. Wokeness is we will destroy you if you don’t agree with us and they keep changing the goalposts all the time. No matter how much you appease, you’re never going to win unless you completely continue to follow and embrace. And that’s why someone like General Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, manifest this wokeness at the four star level. Look at him, he’s got his 101st Airborne patch. He’s got such a distinguished career as a soldier and he rises all the way to the top to become this woke lunatic.

Bill Walton (08:09):

Didn’t he say in the last testimony that we all ought to, we were talking about whether China’s a problem. And he says, “Well, I think it’s more important that we understand white rage.” And he’s been studying white rage and that’s something we should all be willing to atone for. Well Jerry, you’ve made the point that you’ve got all the generals that believe they shouldn’t be political, yet he’s completely political. Where did he cross that line? And how did he get that job? I’d heard about the Obama generals. How did all these four stars end up looking and acting like Mark Milley?

General Boykin (08:50):

First of all, you’re seeing some four stars now that became one stars in the Obama administration. Keep in mind they’ve been progressing up the ladder. One of the things, if you go back and look at that testimony that Milley gave before Congress and he talked about, “I want to understand white rage.” And then he talked about, “And I want to understand what would make a person go and breach the Capitol, this very building we’re sitting in.” And my thought is statutorily, you are the senior advisor to the president of the United States on all things military, you have no command responsibility. You’re the senior advisor to the president. What in the heck did the breach of the Capitol have to do with the military? Why are you the senior advisor to the president, why are you focused on the breach of the Capitol or trying to understand what would make a person do that? And why are you focused on white rage?

General Boykin (10:00):

I was in the army 36 and a half years. This man has been around the army as well. Did you ever see white rage? I don’t even know what it is. And this is part of this woke culture when you don’t have any other way to describe it, make something up. And that’s essentially what has occurred. I never saw white rage in the military. That doesn’t mean there weren’t some racists in the military but I never saw white rage. But even if there was, if there was white rage in our society, what does that have to do with your job as a senior advisor to the president, for all things military? Focus on that.

Bill Walton (10:38):

Let me wander a little bit on this one, because I know the flag officers’ initiative, one of the controversial things that I, it’s not controversial to me, I think it’s great you did it but you basically pointed out, we’re not really sure who’s running this White House and is Milley stepping out of line on this one because he knows there’s nobody in the White House that’s going to jerk a knot in his chain?

General Boykin (11:01):

I think that is exactly what’s happening. I think that he’s been encouraged by the lack of supervision, if you will. I think that he has toed the line, he’s done what the president wanted on some key issues. And some of that has to do with the LGBT agenda and some of it has to do with this critical race theory. And I think that because he is a good boy and he is doing what the president’s told him to do, I think he’s taken some liberties of his own.

Bill Walton (11:32):

The joint chief of staff, you’ve got the head of all the other services in that room. How many other people in the room share that point of view?

General Boykin (11:41):

Well, it’s hard to say clearly.

Bill Walton (11:43):

The guy that runs…

General Boykin (11:45):

Chief of Naval operation does, he clearly is. He’s one of those that has come out and so boldly and proudly talked about how they’re supporting the LGBT agenda in the Navy and they are woke if you will. That’s basically what he said. You got those two. Now, there is some hope that maybe the Air Force hasn’t quite bought into this yet. And that’s because the chief of staff of the Air Force may actually be on the other side here. I need to dig in it more but apparently they’ve got a new Air Force recruiting ad that simply says, “We don’t care about all these other things all we want to know is that you can kick butt when you have to.”

Bill Walton (12:38):

Comparing and contrast that one to the one that Mike talked about in one of our last episodes of woke CIA as a broke CIA, I just want to stop for just a sec. You’re watching the Bill Walton show. I’m here with Jerry Boykin and Mike Waller and we’re talking about how wokeness has infected the very senior levels of the American military and how there may be one outlier in the Air Force, which is sort of a reversal of the good old days when we used to think that the top brass were all conservative. Now we may be suspicious that one of them still is. Mike, talk about that ad. Do you know about the ad that was in the recruiting for the CIA?

Mike Waller (13:18):

Oh they have a series of them.

Bill Walton (13:20):

I only knew the one.

Mike Waller (13:21):

Yeah, she’s talking about, it’s hard to even internalize it, it’s so outrageous. She’s talking about herself, she’s talking about her mental and emotional problems. She’s an unstable intelligence officer who is now the poster child for recruitment. It’s all about herself. It’s all about change. It’s all about her militant attitudes. She’s wearing a Bolshevik fist symbol on her t-shirt that she’s featured in this ad and then she’s pictured with the then CIA director who was Trump’s CIA director and then Obama’s CIA director and there’s pictures of her. She’s been recruited through the ranks as Miss Diversity but it’s all about herself and it’s all about woke revolutionary cultural change within the agency.

Bill Walton (14:15):

Jerry, I don’t think, I got to ask you, what’s happening in Special Ops and the Army? Is that also infecting the Green Berets and Delta? That’s inconceivable to me.

General Boykin (14:30):

Well, have you seen the recruiting ad of the young lady that explains that she grew up with two mothers and she talks all about diversity, have you seen that one?

Bill Walton (14:39):

No.

General Boykin (14:40):

No. No. The question then is, what exactly are we trying to recruit? What type of person are we trying to recruit? Douglas MacArthur stood in the mess hall at West Point in what? 1963, I think. It was in the sixties and you see it in the movie MacArthur. And he gave them a speech there and he came to the end of the speech and he said to the cadets, “Your mission remains determined, fixed and viable. It is to win the nation’s wars.” Our military should be about readiness. Diversity is important but winning wars is what our military mission is, to win the nation’s wars. When our Congress and our president as the commander in chief makes decisions regarding the military, those decisions need to be looked at through the lens of military readiness, preparedness to win the nation’s wars.

General Boykin (15:48):

And I think you can go back to the Obama administration, you can see where this started to change. I think Trump gave us a four year reprieve as he really focused on the readiness of our military and giving them not only the material that they needed but the right rules of engagement to be victorious on the battlefield. And how long did it take them to run ISIS out of Syria? To run ISIS out of Iraq? Not very long because they got the material they needed and they got the rules of engagement.

General Boykin (16:26):

And I will just say this as a final thought, you give a soldier the best material that you can buy, best technology and you give him an advantage on the battlefield by doing so but there is nothing more important on the battlefield than cohesion. You win wars because of cohesion, not because of technology. And when you sit people down in a classroom and you tell them, “All of you over here are oppressors because of the color of your skin and you guys over here because of the color of your skin, you’re the oppressed,” you’re not building cohesion. You’re throwing division into the ranks at a time when you really need to be pulling them together. That’s the winning strategy, the winning formula.

Bill Walton (17:29):

Well, we’ve got a term now that we joked before, every military intelligence community loves acronyms. We’ve got something called DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. And those are the marching orders, that doesn’t have anything to do with winning wars. Mike, what’s your takeaway? Amplify.

Mike Waller (17:55):

Dei is Latin for God, by the way, that same acronym.

Bill Walton (18:00):

It’s true.

Mike Waller (18:01):

This is their creed. Now you need diversity in the military or the intelligence services because you need people with different skills, different backgrounds, different native language.

Bill Walton (18:10):

That’s a different kind of diversity though.

Mike Waller (18:12):

That’s not what we’re talking about here because you’ve got equity and inclusion. What does that mean? Something very different. And once these things become required and everybody has to pretend to go along or actually go along with that mandate, then you’re talking about lowering standards. My son was in the second army basic training, a class that was integrated and sorry to say that their training unit, they were only as good as the chubbiest girl in the group. Not fit to serve in the army in that capacity, at least. And yet they had to go along with it so that you’re lowering standards and lowering readiness simply to be diverse, equitable and inclusive and not win wars. Now take this all the way up to the training and doctrine command and the Pentagon every year the Defense Department updates its dictionary of military and associated terms. It’s almost 400 pages long. The word victory doesn’t appear once, not as a term to define and not even a reference to it. And it doesn’t even have a definition for the term enemy. How can you train people to win?

Bill Walton (19:24):

Victory or enemy is in the lexicon, neither one.

Mike Waller (19:27):

No. It refers to enemy in other capacities but it doesn’t even mention the word victory and its entire text.

Bill Walton (19:34):

How far down the chain of command does this go? How are the junior officers on this? Are they buying into?

General Boykin (19:40):

Frustrated.

Bill Walton (19:40):

They’re frustrated and I’m sure the noncoms are outraged. I’m speaking as a spec for.

General Boykin (19:53):

Bill, a guy called me from Kuwait, this was back during the gas shortage. And the guy said, “Sir, I felt like I owed it to you because you’ve been a mentor to me,” but he said, “when the last guy leaves Kuwait, I’m coming back. I’m turning in my resignation. I’m not going to stay.” He said, “This has become intolerable in terms of what I’m being required to do, what I’m being required to spend my time on.” And he’s not the only one. I talked to a guy out in Fort Campbell that told me the same thing, a noncommissioned officer. And people are getting fed up with what’s happening and they’re starting to walk. You’re starting to see them now. I just talked to a guy yesterday, he said, “My son, he’s a major,” he said, “I think he’s going to get out. Special Forces major by the way, I think he’s going to get out.”

General Boykin (20:56):

Well, what people don’t understand and I want your viewers to understand this. When you shove a social experiment on a military unit, whether it’s Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines or Coast Guard, it’s not just a matter of you give them what you want done. There is a training program that goes with that. And it’s ours and it’s not a one time thing. It’s a repetitive thing. And the commander has to make sure that he’s got a 100% of his people that have been through that training because his performance appraisal is dependent upon it for him to have a 100% on diversity, on critical race theory, on inclusion, on integrating women into the military.

Bill Walton (21:46):

How much time in a typical week or typical month would they spend in the classroom learning about this?

General Boykin (21:53):

You’ll wind up spending an entire day, probably every couple of months. An entire day. That’s the day you could be out on the range. And that’s why if you go back to the Vietnam era and what’s his name? The POW that I asked you about earlier.

Mike Waller (22:21):

Jeremiah Denton.

General Boykin (22:21):

Yeah, My identity. Yeah. Admiral Jeremiah Denton was a POW and they beat him mercilessly to get him to do a video and he wouldn’t do it. And finally, when he said he would do it, he went out there and he set before the cameras and you can find this on YouTube. And he blinked the whole time. He was blinking the word torture. He got the Navy Cross for it.

Mike Waller (22:45):

In Morse code.

Bill Walton (22:46):

In Morse code he was doing it.

General Boykin (22:48):

In Morse code. And he got the Navy Cross for it because he had been trained. But then if you go back and look at when those two patrol boats were taken off the coast of Iran and within two hours, the commander of those two patrol boats, also a Naval Academy graduate was looking in the camera and saying, “This is all our fault and we want to apologize to the Iranians,” that guy didn’t get the kind of training the Jeremiah Denton got, about how to prepare for a combat environment and why? Because when they rushed out the door, I guarantee you, they were trying to get all of these mandatory classes in. You take one class and every couple of months you got to spend an hour on it. Okay, throw in the other classes too. Throw in the other things that they have to do that are mandatory because they’re part of a social experiment. You are wasting precious training time and you’re doing a disservice to those young men and women.

Bill Walton (23:53):

You’re watching the Bill Walton Show and I’m talking with Mike Waller and Jerry Boykin about the intrusion into our military effectiveness and readiness with all these other training programs that are not only putting really bad ideas in place but they’re also wasting time. Precious time. Has the rubber hit the road in terms of combat. We joked about the lowest common denominator in your platoon. We haven’t been an action that much. Does anybody know, have we tested this in combat? Do we know for fact? We believe it but have we had any evidence in any theater where these other theories have hurt our effectiveness?

General Boykin (24:37):

You mean where are these social experiments have had an impact on us?

Bill Walton (24:42):

Yes.

General Boykin (24:43):

Yeah. Just look at the retention rates and the recruiting. Those are two indicators.

Bill Walton (24:52):

And what are they going to tell us?

General Boykin (24:54):

They’re going to show you that people are leaving the military. That young officers and noncommissioned officers are leaving the military. It’s not the upper echelon that’s leaving.

Bill Walton (25:02):

Mike, you also look at all the other intelligence agencies, is this this pervasive there? Are we losing the right kind of people for this fight?

Mike Waller (25:11):

You’ve got great operators in the CIA and some fine field agents in the FBI in their thirties who are already checking out.

Bill Walton (25:22):

And who’s checking in?

Mike Waller (25:23):

Well, look at the ads, look at the recruitment ads, at the leadership.

Bill Walton (25:26):

They’re signing up.

Mike Waller (25:27):

They want their own.

Bill Walton (25:28):

That looks like me.

Mike Waller (25:30):

Their own special recruits. They’ve got the Latinx types who wear the Bolshevik fists and you’ve got the gay librarian CIA ad. I don’t know if you saw that ad. It’s all about how gay he is and how great it is to be gay in the CIA. It’s like, well okay as long as you’re not a security risk, fine, but why is this an issue? And why are you recruiting that as a theme now? What does that say to really solid patriots who want to join these agencies and who don’t want this social engineering? They got nowhere to go. They’ll find a different road, different career and we’ll be losing those kinds of people.

Bill Walton (26:08):

Is our main line of action here is to elect a president who will restore a lot of what Trump did? Although, Trump we’ve talked about was not very good at making changes inside these big organizations. He did things on top. He put some money in but I don’t think he really changed the culture that much.

Mike Waller (26:29):

No, we have to be honest. Donald Trump was part of the problem on this. His defense secretaries supervised all this in the Pentagon. His CIA director, Gina Haspel produced those ads. She appears in one of the ads so we can’t delude ourselves to think just because we like a certain politician that he’s going to fix things because Trump undermined the work of so many of us within the Pentagon and the whole national security community. He fired them within his first few weeks in office and he allowed others to get around him who undermined him the whole way through. We can’t romanticize our political leaders.

General Boykin (27:07):

The one thing he did do, well a couple of things that he did that were positive though, I think with regards to the military and that is he did start to restore the budget that had been cut deeply by Barack Obama. He restored the budget and he gave them the rules of engagement that they needed to win on the battlefield. And those were both positives. The other thing he did and he was fought all the way by his defense secretary. And that was that he went back and took a common sense approach to the transgender issue. And he said, “We’re not going to bring transgenders into the military that we’re going to have to spend a lot of money and a lot of time on, they’re not going to be ready to fight.” And he reversed that. Now it’s been re-established by Joe Biden, but he did do that.

General Boykin (28:01):

And Jim Mattis followed him all the way on that. But it was just common sense. Why do we bring people in that have a medical issue that we’re going to have to spend a lot of money on and they’re unfit and unready for combat for a period of time here. And I think that was a positive on his part. But you’re right, I agree with Mike, some of the people he put in there were, and I could have told him if he’d asked me which he didn’t, that Gina Haspel was not going to serve him well.

Bill Walton (28:43):

Well, that was one of his, I worked for him in transition and we concluded that and we sat around and talked about this. He was basically was used to running a real estate deal shop and being a reality TV star. And the reality TV star was great in terms of getting elected and running a deal shop, maybe helpful in some of the negotiations he was on my getting out of the Iran deal and things like that and pushing NATO to pay their dues. Those kinds of instincts as a negotiator were terrific. He was terrible CEO, manager.

Bill Walton (29:19):

And he gave this speech at a CPAC recently and the thing I didn’t hear, I didn’t hear that he learned anything. I would have loved a paragraph in there, “Well, I was president and here’s what I learned. I learned you got to have really good people and you got to ask guys like Jerry Boykin and Mike Waller what they think because these are people really understand where the skeletons are and what the opportunities are and who your friends are and who your enemies are.” He didn’t seem to have any instincts for that and he still doesn’t. That was a speech, not a question but you’re free to comment.

Mike Waller (29:59):

No disagreement there. He could have even said, “The swamp is far worse than I ever thought.”

Bill Walton (30:05):

Something like that. What’s our line of action? What do we do?

Mike Waller (30:12):

We have to expose this. And it’s a question of retired officers speaking their minds, speaking freely, abiding by whatever UCMJ provisions might govern what they say and how they say it. Far better signing onto your initiative or your colleagues’ initiative at the general and admiral level but even the junior field grade officers, they still have a lot to say, a lot of really wonderful senior noncommissioned officers, the sergeants, the backbone of the military have a whole lot of knowledge but they’re not saying it because they’re too disciplined to say anything publicly. And they also don’t know to whom to turn. And this is where the whistleblower initiative you were talking about earlier with the Congressman Crenshaw. Go to Congressman Crenshaw webpage and he has a whistleblower page where whistleblowers from the active duty military may sign onto that page with full legal whistleblower protection to talk about problems that they see so that our lawmakers can fix them.

General Boykin (31:20):

And they will not be exposed. Their names will not be exposed. And I think that’s what most people worry about. But listen, let’s start at something even more fundamental. They need to get in behind candidates and get involved in the political process to include voting, the most fundamental right that our founding fathers gave us was the right to choose our own leaders. And I must tell you that I’ve seen a lot of people in the military that didn’t vote. It wasn’t their home state, they didn’t take the time to ask for an absentee ballot and they didn’t vote.

General Boykin (32:05):

The military people as well as the people within our intel community, they need to vote. And they need to get in behind candidates. Now as active duty military, you can’t do that, but you can vote and that’s what you need to do because the only way we’re going to change thing is getting the right people in the Congress, the House and the Senate that are not going to stand for this. That we can go to and we can say, “We really need your help on this.” And they’ll understand the issue just like Dan Crenshaw and Tom Cotton, who were both military veterans. And we need to not underestimate the importance of getting out and voting and supporting candidates and being involved in the process.

Bill Walton (32:59):

But most people won’t do that, don’t do that. Mike, you write something, it’s pretty chilling. You wrote a piece called and you’ll have to pronounce this for me, the Zampolits of Wokeness. And one things I’m very concerned is we’re beginning to develop this tell on other people, turn people in culture, and even in schools now, they’re deputizing kids to say, “You’re supposed to tell us if somebody is not acting in a politically correct way.” And so you got informers. And you went through a whole list of people that were categories of groups that that was like and you mentioned things like, gosh, what was in your list here? The Robespierre of the French Revolution was woke and the Bolsheviks, the Wehrmacht in Germany. Talk about how you get and Soviet Union ended up with a chain of command that had to do with the military so-called and the other one was political.

Mike Waller (34:01):

Yeah. Well, in the case of the Soviet army, they built a new army. The tsarist army was abolished during the Russian civil war so there was a whole new army developed and they had a dual command structure. They had the military command structure and they had the Communist Party political command structure. And those political commanders were called political commissars to impose party rule within the ranks of all the officers and the enlisted or conscripts. During World War II, the commissar system was so disastrous militarily that Stalin got rid of it and he replaced it with something called the Zampolit, Z-A-M-P-O-L-I-T. And that’s a classical communist abbreviation for a much larger term but it was essentially a political commissar system where Communist Party members in uniform were actually making command decisions but they were also running informant networks with the secret police to go after anyone who exhibited the slightest bit of political, not even disloyalty but political deviationism.

Mike Waller (35:05):

Right now you have a revival of that. Now, the Zampolits rose in the Soviet system to ruin the Soviet army so Leonid Brezhnev and some of the biggest leaders of the Soviet Communist Party structure, as well as the Soviet defense minister at certain points, had come up as political police as Zampolits or commissars. You’re having that today, and I know many of these officers and former officers where they said, “Colonels, I’m not going to get my star. I didn’t kiss enough behind. I know why. Look at so-and-so, he’s a brown noser. He’s going to make it to full general.” And sure enough, some of them had watched them over the years and they were right.

Mike Waller (35:45):

That’s the kind of a Zampolit system that we have here, where you go ahead and you obey and you do the right kiss up work and you check the right boxes and you’re much more sure of rising up through the ranks than a very capable, very competent, very, very selfless officer or even an enlisted man would do in the ranks of our sergeants, for example. You’re creating a political system within our military that needs to have a name so I just borrowed the Soviet name, Zampolits. But look what’s happened recently, what was reported this past week. The office of the Secretary of Defense has hired a foreign company called Moonshot CVE to run an electronic surveillance network of American uniformed personnel, to monitor their communications that hopefully are not password protected but monitor their communications, their social communications, any of their constitutionally protected expression to root out who is an ideological deviationist.

Mike Waller (36:52):

Moonshot CVE, who are these people? The person running it was with the Obama Foundation, doing projects funded by George Soros, doing work with a group at American University called PERIL, which is funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Germany. Now what’s Rosa Luxemburg? Rosa Luxemburg was a founder of what became the German Communist Party. It’s a front of the present German Communist Party and it’s tied to the old East German Stasi, the KGB of East Germany, which was taken over fully by the Soviet KGB in 1989. One of their managers was the Communist Party chief of Dresden, Germany, who was the KGB officer supervising the East German secret police in East Germany at that time, a KGB major named Vladimir Putin.

Mike Waller (37:46):

You have to wonder, have foreign enemies subverted our armed forces through these and other means? And why aren’t we treating this as a counterintelligence issue? Because the Russians cannot defeat us militarily except through nuclear war. They can defeat us by subverting us.

Bill Walton (38:09):

Wow. You’re watching the Bill Walton Show, a sort of stunned Bill Walton here with Mike Waller and Jerry Boykin and we’re talking about the degree to which it appears the defense establishment has been infiltrated by those not only enemies within but enemies without, actual communist Chinese. You didn’t mention the Chinese but you mentioned the Russians. Are we seeing infiltration from the Chinese as well?

General Boykin (38:37):

Yes. You’re seeing them more on the civilian side than you are in the ranks of the military but yeah, every entity of our government is infiltrated to some level by the Chinese. But I want to go back to something that Mike was talking about in this. When Joseph Stalin came to power, he purged, I think it was 36,000 senior officers from the ranks of the Soviet military, 36,000. You heard what Mike said about this monitoring people’s social media? Well, the rest of that is that they’re going to be shaking people down for tattoos that indicate that they’re part of some subversive organization or anything else that would indicate that they’ve been part of a subversive organization.

Bill Walton (39:37):

Well, by subversive specifically they mean, white people.

General Boykin (39:43):

According to their definition.

Bill Walton (39:43):

People filled with white rage. This was the Mark Milley charge. They’re not chasing down anybody else. They’re not chasing down Antifa or Black Lives Matter.

Mike Waller (39:53):

Well, they’re sweeping under the rug that they’ve allowed the Salvadoran MS-13 gang group to infiltrate. They’ve been recruiting MS-13 but they’re trying to cover that up. You don’t hear them talking about that kind of infiltration of our armed forces but it’s a real problem.

General Boykin (40:11):

But this is Soviet tactics. That’s why the Soviets were not prepared to fight the Germans. 36,000 leaders, senior leaders, colonels and above. 36,000, they had no leadership. As you start talking about purging the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, you start talking about purging them. Just be honest about the fact that we’re following a communist model. We’re doing the same thing that Joseph Stalin did and that’s not good.

Bill Walton (40:54):

This is Marxism Marxism. The cultural Marxism is what’s been driving the critical race theory but this is they’re using the old Soviet tactics as well. This is an across the board assault.

General Boykin (41:07):

Well just go back and look at what happened last summer, all of those riots in the streets and pulling down statues and all that. And then spend a little time on the web reading about the cultural revolution in China. Right Mike?

Mike Waller (41:24):

Just what they did.

General Boykin (41:25):

You’re going to see a lot of similarities. And then when you compare that to the fact that Patrisse Cullors is on the web saying, “Yeah, we’re trained Marxists.” Doesn’t take you long to figure out that we are following the Marxist model. And if we don’t stop it, if we don’t take active steps to stop it.

Bill Walton (41:50):

Well, even before the Chinese did it, I think we talked about this, Lenin, first thing he did essentially was he stopped, he changed the whole system of justice where you weren’t guilty of an individual crime. The group you were in was the crime identification. If you were an accountant or if you were a school teacher or something like that, you were automatically labeled as guilty. And that’s pretty much what’s happening with the critical race theory. If you’re white, therefore you’re in the guilt group.

Mike Waller (42:23):

Right. And this is classical cultural Marxism as it’s been developing because you’re pitting entire different groups against one another culturally, as opposed to economic classes like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Now they’ve moved it toward ethnic groups or regional groups or ancestry.

General Boykin (42:44):

And keep in mind, a lot of people didn’t understand what the Occupy Wall Street was, but that was a Marxist activity because it was pitting the proletariat against the bourgeois, with the bourgeoisie. Which was the 1%, remember? And finally they settled on something that worked and that was race and that’s what we’re dealing with today.

Bill Walton (43:11):

They tried 1%, it didn’t didn’t work, but race is.

General Boykin (43:14):

Right. Race works. But the bourgeoisie against the proletariat was not the formula to get to America but race is but it’s Marxism. It’s about division that ultimately results in major chaos and bloodshed. And then the government has its opportunity to just as Mao did in 1966, is to sweep in and take over an establish a totalitarian government.

Bill Walton (43:43):

Well Longterm I guess, in the long run as Keynes said, “We’re all dead.” But longterm, eventually Soviet Union came a crop. You can’t kill all your generals in effect to win a war. The only reason they came out well on in World War II is because we came in and also, they just had so many more numbers than the Germans did.

General Boykin (44:04):

They were willing to sacrifice their people.

Bill Walton (44:06):

Tens of millions of people. They won through sheer force of the numbers. And then China, the cultural revolution they had to unwind because they ended up Mao said, “We can’t do this, we’re destroying.” But then they switched to capitalism with Chinese characteristics. They abandoned that because they couldn’t survive with that model. It seems to me, this is not to survive in that model. And let’s talk about, we got just a couple seconds here, minutes here, but let’s talk about useful idiots. The people that aid and abet. The press is all in on this. We’ve got a media that’s absolutely thinking this is great. Now it seems to me that if cultural Marxism really prevails, it’s going to be very painful for a lot of them because they’re not going to be in the chosen few. You’re an historian. Tell me how this is going to end.

Mike Waller (45:03):

This will die out at some point.

Bill Walton (45:06):

Hopefully before we do.

Mike Waller (45:08):

Well, it’s interesting that the people who always want to impose these things are the same ones who want to take away everybody’s right to self defense and means of self defense. And so when you see these type of people taking power, abusing the court system and the political system and the regulatory system and the all measures of government power against the individual and then call certain riots and large protests insurrections that must be crushed by every instrument of force that the United States government has. You’re seeing some people at the very top who clearly intend to abuse power. When the Speaker of the House herself refers to her Republican colleagues, all of them, as enemies of the state, that’s a real danger. When you have a company affiliated with a retired senior general, McChrystal, using military technology developed for psychological warfare purposes against foreign enemies and used as campaign technology in the United States in the most contentious election in our history, that’s a problem.

Mike Waller (46:15):

When you have the author of General Patraeus’ counterinsurgency manual, Lieutenant Colonel Nagl come out publicly and say in the summer of 2020 that President Trump must be overthrown militarily and physically removed from the White House if the elections don’t go the way this retired Lieutenant Colonel wants. Milley was wishy-washy in criticizing it. He should have condemned it outright. Instead he brushed it off and said, “He’s going to do his duty,” whatever that duty was. But you are seeing this increasing use of senior counterinsurgency, former officers, deploying their counterinsurgency technologies and techniques against the American public for political campaigns. This is a huge danger that we have to be really wise to and stop.

Bill Walton (47:03):

What are you guys that Center for Security Policy doing about it?

Mike Waller (47:07):

We’re exposing it. That’s the only thing we can do is expose it.

Bill Walton (47:10):

Shine a light on it.

Mike Waller (47:10):

Inform the public.

Bill Walton (47:12):

Things like this, people need to know what’s going on. And you need to view this as, it’s really happening. It’s really bad. And if you don’t take some action, it’s coming to you. And Jerry, you’ve launched, the retired officer, a group of you have. What’s sort of line of action through that initiative?

General Boykin (47:35):

Exactly what Mike just talked about. Exposing this, that’s what the letter was all about but I will tell you, Bill, I’m not as sanguine about this as you are. And that’s because we’ve got a generation of young people today who have been indoctrinated. They believe that socialism is preferable to capitalism. That’s a very dangerous thing. What does it take to reeducate them, to get them out of this mindset? Because we’ve allowed them in the public schools and the universities to be indoctrinated and now that’s what they believe. I think the hard part is turning the next generation around and getting them beyond these very bogus beliefs that they have. And that’s why I’m not as sanguine as you are in terms of it dying on its own under its own weight as it did in China and Russia.

Bill Walton (48:43):

I didn’t give you a timeframe. It may outlast us by decades, which is a concern. Well, we’ve got to wrap up. Mike Waller, thank you. You can be found at, what’s your website?

Mike Waller (48:55):

Centerforsecuritypolicy.org.

Bill Walton (48:57):

Okay, Mike. Jerry, you’re now executive vice president for the Family Research Council and that’s really good.

General Boykin (49:03):

Frc.org.

Bill Walton (49:03):

And what’s the information for the retired officers campaign?

General Boykin (49:11):

Flagofficersforamerica.org, I think.

Bill Walton (49:12):

Okay. You’re watching the Bill Walton Show. You’ve been watching the Bill Walton Show and we’ve been having a very sobering conversation about the enemies of American freedom and hopefully some lines of action about what we can do about it. You can find us as always at thebillwaltonshow.com and all the other major podcast platforms and YouTube. And YouTube so long as YouTube doesn’t take this show off the channel. I don’t think we violated community guidelines today but we will find out. Anyway, thanks for watching and listening and you’ll see us next time. Thanks.

Bill Walton (49:51):

I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Want more? Click the subscribe button or head over to thebillwaltonshow.com to choose from over a 100 episodes. You can also learn more about our guests on our interesting people page. And send us your comments. We read every one and your thoughts help us guide the show. If it’s easier for you to listen, check out our podcast page and subscribe there. In return, we’ll keep you informed about what’s true, what’s right and what’s next. Thanks for joining