I Was Wrong, There IS an Extremism Epidemic in the U.S. Military
Chase Spears
7–8 minutes
One of the hard realities of life is making mistakes, of believing things in youth, naivety, or perhaps even optimism that are eventually proven wrong by persevering through new experiences. One such instance forcefully confronted me in recent days. Having served in the U.S. Army for 20 years, I found former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s partisan assertion that there was an infestation of extremism loose in the U.S. military fictional and insulting. But I have now seen it with my own eyes. It’s time for a mea culpa. 
I awoke on Thursday, September 11th, with the kind of sadness for our country that, compared to what I felt on September 12, 2001, the morning after the twin towers fell in New York. 
“Did it really happen?” I asked myself as a college student, hoping it was all a terrible nightmare. Back in the present, I looked at my phone to see a message from a colleague. He shared a screen capture of Army Col. Junel Jeffrey’s take on Charlie Kirk’s assassination: “Sometimes we reap what we sow. That is all.” 
Then another example came in, then another. It was clear to me that this had been no dream, but a very real, lived-out nightmare. More questions came, a repetition of what I wondered as the dust settled over lower Manhattan two decades before, when we could no longer deny the contempt that radical Islam has for the West. We asked things like "Why do they hate us so viciously? How many more will they try to kill? Will the nation rise to meet this murderous threat?" Now I ask these questions about Americans on the left.
We failed to defeat Al Qaeda over the course of two decades. Worse still, we allowed the American left wing to import that foreign terrorist association’s agenda, tactics, and desired end state: violent destruction of those marked as ‘infidels.’ Then we gave these neo-Qaeda agents safe harbor in the ranks of our military. Perhaps it’s time to reflect on the reality that a force that welcomed anti-American extremists in its ranks was ineffective at defeating extremists abroad. 
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https://redstate.com/chase-spears/2025/09/23/i-was-wrong-there-is-an-extremism-epidemic-in-the-us-military-n2194241Editor's Note: Thanks to President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's leadership, the warrior ethos is coming back to America's military.