IT'S NOT THAT THE TRUMPISTS ARE RACIST...:

I don't know if Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., hates me because I'm Jewish. I don't know if he thinks I'm less of an American because I'm not a white Christian. But I'm positive that Gen. Mark Milley doesn't think that way. 

The Joint Chiefs chairman's response to questions in the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday defending anti-racism and anti-white-extremism education in the military is rightfully going viral. His soliloquy on why he thinks it's important for cadets at the Army's university to learn about critical race theory and to understand "white rage" and the reasons why Americans felt compelled to attack the Capitol building and the Constitution he's sworn to defend is a landmark moment. Milley's speech should be held up and remembered as important as when his predecessor Adm. Mike Mullen sat at a similar witness table in the Senate and laid bare why he could no longer support the shameful, dishonest, and dishonorable "don't ask, don't tell" policy that banned openly gay Americans from serving their country. Milley's stance against the shameful, dishonest, and dishonorable march against the critical race theory boogeyman is no less important. 

There's a battle for America going on right now. Milley stood on a wall, as most military men and women do, and defended it. It's a wall between freedom and fascism; good and evil. It's a wall holding back something sinister that we have seen in human history before, here and elsewhere. He didn't build the wall. It's always existed. But it's a wall that partisan-factioned opportunists like Gaetz and other firebrand extremists depend on. They use it hoping to separate themselves and a narrowly-defined and -experienced America from what exists before their very eyes. Led most recently by ex-President Donald Trump, they brand nearly every segment of American society that doesn't look, sound, talk, think, vote, or pray like them as enemies of the state, including, now, the U.S. military.

It's like that poem. "First they came for the..."--you know the one. In the past four years, with the rise of the Trump era's brand of white supremacy and nativism, the far right has been embraced by the center-right and they've targeted a similar list of enemies: journalists, Muslims, Black protestors, imaginary caravans of culture-changing Latino immigrants, the conspiracy of "globalist" Jews, moderate conservatives, and women, gays, and transgender Americans who serve their country in uniform. Well, now they're coming for the generals. 

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