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Blake Masters wants some good old-fashioned Stalinist purges of U.S. generals [1]
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Date: 2022-09-15
He repeated it at a Tweet Spaces event in November. “The general core is rotten. You have to be like a left-wing politician to get promoted above a two-star general now. It’s not going to be an effective lethal fighting force if we’re teaching soldiers about social justice and diversity and inclusion and critical race theory, and we’re naming warships after gay rights heroes instead of, you know, World War II admirals and stuff,” he continued. “So I think cleaning house in the military, cleaning house in the DOJ, FBI, making sure those institutions aren’t weaponized against us, that’s a huge project.”
In February, on a far-fright podcast, he said, “We just have to get serious again. And it means purging the military of the left-wing generals.” He reiterated his call to gut the military leadership in a radio interview in March. “Basically every general above a two-star at this point is some kind of left-wing politician, and they need to be fired and retired, and you need to promote the apolitical colonels who actually want to be serious about, again, projecting lethality when called upon.”
He’s not made his hatred for the military brass a secret at all, though it’s a favorite theme for his appearances on far-right media. He’s been out there tweeting it, calling generals “bozos.”
x Our top generals have turned into woke corporate bozos, and our troops deserve better. pic.twitter.com/kC4fgSeEZR — Blake Masters (@bgmasters) November 16, 2021
Obviously, Masters doesn’t want apolitical generals—he wants ones who agree with his politics. Why he thinks it’s going to be colonels isn’t clear. As VICE News points out, “active-duty military personnel actually leaned slightly toward Biden - heading into the election, according to a pre-election survey conducted by Military Times and Syracuse University's Institute for Veterans and Military Families. And the military is roughly as diverse racially as the broader U.S. society.”
Which gets at Masters’ real problem with the generals—they’re not white supremacist enough. He’s particularly critical of Sen. Mike Milley, who he mocks as “General ‘White Rage’ Milley” because he’s spoken about the need for the military to understand what’s going on with violent segregationists and white supremacists.
“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” Milley said in a congressional hearing. “So, what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”
He’s probably also not too happy with Milley’s break with and criticism of Donald Trump. Milley has publicly apologized for having walked with Trump in that Bible photo op stunt on June 1, 2020, at the height of protests following George Floyd’s murder.
“I should not have been there,” Milley said in a speech at the National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”
Masters graduated from a private prep high school in Tucscon, Arizona in 2004. He did not enlist to go fight in Iraq and Afghanistan but instead went to Stanford University. After graduating college in 2008, he decided to continue at Standford for his law degree. For someone who seems to have a lot of ideas about what the U.S. military needs, he sure stayed far away from it when he had the opportunity to make a difference.
His opponent, incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly, is a retired astronaut and retired U.S. Navy captain.
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