When Gen. Milley Retires, Battalion Will Be Tasked with Trawling Social Media for One Type of Post
As one of the top military officials in the country prepares to leave office, a special battalion has been tasked with scouring social media to protect his reputation.
General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is set to retire at the end of this year. Meanwhile, according to The Intercept, U.S. Army Protective Services Battalion. the Pentagon’s own Secret Service, is being assigned to protect him from threats, including social media “embarrassment.”
The Protective Service has long sheltered top military brass from harm, but in a document from September 2022, the battalion’s scope was expanded to include scouring social media looking for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats and “negative sentiment” regarding the people under its protection, and that includes Gen. Milley.
In essence, the Protective Service is monitoring social media for any criticism of the general.
In response, several people have spoken out against this very disturbing turn of affairs. Ilia Siatitsa, director of Privacy International, told The Intercept, “Expressing ‘positive or negative sentiment towards a senior high-risk individual’ cannot be deemed sufficient grounds for government agencies to conduct surveillance operations,” Siatitsa said.
“The ability to express opinions, criticize, make assumptions, or form value judgments — especially regarding public officials — is a quintessential part of democratic society,” she continued.
Meanwhile, the New York Post reported that several veterans have spoken out against the military’s monitoring of social media in order to protect officials from criticism.
“Why are we wasting resources on what’s quasi-spying or at least monitoring the First Amendment rights of our citizens?” Marine veteran Mark Geist asked.
Meanwhile, Florida’s Republican Congressman Cory Mills, an army veteran, said, “While our adversaries are focused on military strategy and increasing capabilities, our Pentagon is worried about mean social media posts and pronouns. This is another example of the backward priorities of the Biden administration who have put military readiness on the back burner.”
Giest and Mills are absolutely spot-on here. First, it goes without saying that it is beyond disturbing that the military would be engaging in this type of surveillance.
The First Amendment guarantees the right of Americans to criticize their government, and using the military to survey the public for criticism is a direct violation of the Constitution.
Meanwhile, as foreign adversaries become more and more emboldened by America’s weakness, the military should be focused more on countering their aggression, rather than investigating mean tweets from American citizens.
More than ever, we need a military that is going to defend Americans from harm.
This brings us to the fact that if there is anyone in the military who is worthy of harsh criticism, it is Milley, who is one of the worst commanders the country has ever had.
He has presided over some of the worst disasters in American military history, most notably the Afghanistan withdrawal, during which his ineptitude was on display for the whole world to see.
It also came to light in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book “Peril” that Milley reportedly went behind then-President Donald Trump’s back in October of 2020 to call Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng to promise that if the United States was “going to attack [China], I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
In addition, on Milley’s watch, the military has gone the way of all major institutions, by embracing the woke agenda, discouraging many patriotic Americans from joining it.
The Protective Service knows that Milley will face this criticism when he leaves, and they cannot stand it. Therefore, like the Biden administration, the only way they can defeat it is to silence it.
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