I have to tell you that I’m getting a little tired of people who are willing to fight to the last drop of other people’s blood, figuratively and literally. Particularly I’m concerned that some people in the conservative sphere are either expressly or impliedly sending a message to vulnerable, often young, people that is simply going to get them into a serious jam with no compensating benefit. Sometimes this means urging them to protest in person where they can be framed. Other times it is to spill classified material. Do not urge people to risk everything for some internet jollies.
Look, the terrain is unfair and the justice system is stacked against us. We go to prison for things leftists get hi-fives for doing. Deal with it until we can change it. And do not encourage people to place themselves in harm’s way for the giddy thrill of some mild lib own. The cheerleaders go on to new triumphs and the poor saps sit staring at concrete walls. I don’t like it when the warmongers want to send other people’s kids off to fight their wars, and I don’t like it when some on our side urge others to jump on a grenade for their own agendas. Even if I like their agendas.
Take the “Hey everybody, go out and protest in blue cities” thing. Yes, you have a constitutional right to protest and it’s worth a Dixie cup of warm spit. The fact is that if you go into a blue city and put yourself under the jurisdiction of a blue district attorney or federal prosecutor, you can be framed. You will not have the benefit of the law, and you cannot rely on judges to give you the benefit of the Constitution. We’ve seen this again and again with the J6 defendants. Going to a physical protest where you are putting yourself under the power of corrupt government officials is just dumb. You do it for the benefit of some politician or some group and they are going to leave you in the lurch to bear the consequences after they pack up and move on. Going to some sort of physical protest in a blue city may feel good, but so does onanism, and at least that has a happy ending.
There are better ways to make yourself useful, like organizing people to go out and register voters and legally collect votes. That’s useful. Be like Scott Pressler, The Persistence, and go out and do something that actually matters. Here’s the simple fact: Republicans riot at the ballot box. Democrats riot in the street and they get a free pass. You show up, and even if you are peaceful (as we tend to be) you are risking getting arrested and framed and your life‘s going get turned upside down. Look at that guy who was praying outside of abortion clinics. A corrupt FBI showed up with 15 cars full of punks with assault rifles to bust him. I don’t like the reality any more than you do, but that is the reality. If you want to damage our enemies, and you should, damage them at the ballot box. Has anyone ever been won over to our side because some conservatives got into a street beef?
Now let’s talk about whistleblowers and classified material. You look at someone like Hillary Clinton, who took 30,000 classified documents and basically put them out on the Internet and you know she’s never going to get prosecuted for treating the law like her husband treated his interns. That human sausage Vindman allegedly leaked stuff – I don’t know if it was him or someone else – but whoever did was never gong to be prosecuted. But you’re going to be if you do. Yes, there are two sets of laws, and accepting that reality is not surrender. It is the first step toward overturning a corrupt system.
Recommended
Some of us are calling this Air Force enlisted guy a hero. This is guy not a hero and he is not a whistleblower despite the fact that he revealed information from some sort of classified briefing that was less tactically relevant then embarrassing to the regime. If you reveal classified information, they are going to put you in jail for 30 years. If a leftist does it, they are not going to do anything. For example, none of them could be bothered to find out the person who damaged our system much more severely by leaking the draft Dobbs opinion. But this leak was mildly embarrassing to the regime, instead of useful, so the entire federal government and the entire regime media focused on it. This is true even though it was a leak with almost no real tactical significance, based on what I have seen – do you think the Russians don’t know what their own casualties are?
I would like to get back to a system like we (sort of) used to have where everybody protected classified information and anybody passing it out would be prosecuted, but that’s not going to happen for a while. Deal with it, and do not make it easy for them to crush you. Yes, unfair, wrong, etc. I get it. Biden’s going to keep stuff in his garage and he’s going to get a pass. Trump’s going to get indicted for keeping it locked away under Secret Service protection. It’s not fair, it’s not right, and it’s also not smart to tell young people “Hey go ahead and hand this stuff out.”
This 23-year old Air Force guy is going to jail forever, and I don’t want other people to think it’s a great idea and that they should do it too. Yes, if it didn’t embarrass this Regime – in contrast to, say, the Trump administration – he would be a regime media hero. But that’s not the situation. Don’t create a situation where young impressionable people throw their lives away doing things like this.
I don’t know anything about this classified information other than what I seen. It looks to me like some sort of senior staff briefing slides with the kind of information that’s typically provided to flag officers in daily updates. I don’t buy that this is some sort of giant conspiracy. It’s pretty obvious that this guy had access to it – he should not have – and printed it out somehow, and then took freaking pictures of it – in a SCIF, for heaven’s sake. Another proud moment for our woke military.
Look, he was not trying to blow the lid off this disastrous war – almost nothing I have seen was surprising or unexpected. But that does not matter. Some classified stuff is classified because it is embarrassing. But a military cannot function without secrecy. Taking seriously the obligation that you voluntarily undertook to safeguard classified materials – as millions of us have – is not somehow siding with the regime. None of us with access got elected by the American people to make declassification decisions. We promised to keep our country’s secrets, period. There are sometimes ways to blow whistles, but let’s not try and make this guy into some whistleblowing hero. It appears he was trying to impress the friends he had on whatever weird internet site he was part of. But then, we only know what the regime media has told us, and the regime media is garbage.
The important point is to make clear to our people that they should not expose themselves to the corrupt power of the corrupt regime unnecessarily. I don’t want another person out there to decide to break the law – and it is breaking the law – by releasing classified information that he she or xe was entrusted. Doing that might get soldiers killed, but it definitely will ruin that leaker’s life because the leaker is not going to get a pardon like Bradley Manning did because he tucks and squats.
What this Air Force guy did is simply going to put him in jail and it’s not going to change anything and, frankly, he didn’t tell us anything that people with any kind of knowledge of the military in general probably could not have guesstimated. What a waste. Be smart. Don’t help them crush you.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
Look, you need to keep up the fight by joining Townhall VIP right now. You get access to a bunch of great stuff, not the least of which is my extra Wednesday column, my weekly Stream of Kurtiousness videos every Friday, and the Unredacted podcast every Monday! Plus, some stuff from Larry O’Connor – and a bunch of other stuff.
