Attention all Soldiers and Veterans

General Mattis told you today who is your enemy. You swore to protect the Constitution, not donald trump. Remember your oath to protect the Constitution with your life. When you took that oath, did you mean it or not? Just as we who despise trump have been saying all along, trump is an enemy of the Constitution.

That makes trump your personal enemy. You swore it with your life.

"I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad."
- General James Mattis; former Sec of Defense under trump

 

I hope you never get close enough to act out on your rehetoric or are you just trying to rouse others?

 

Geez what a load of hysterical nonsense.

 

Do YOU want to see another Kent State shooting?

 

I want to see riots and looting end. Most rational people do. Any idea the death toll yet?

 

If the Military is brought in how will you prevent another Kent State?

The military have already acted against peaceful protestors

All it would take is for one of the Boogaloo Bois to start shooting at the military and you would have the civil war they have been trying to promote

 

Nice deflection, the OP is literally calling OUR President, the enemy. One could reasonably call it a call to violence against him.

 

Keep an eye on social media. When a riot is planned show up first with overwhelming force to protect the peaceful protesters. Any looting or destruction of people or property arrest suspects immediately. These people are criminals not soldiers. They will yield.

 

Long long stretch

One can disagree with someone and still support them

Trump though is handling this so badly that a civil war is all but inevitable

 

Too easy though, in troubled times, for someone to do the wrong thing

Remember there are more guns than in the sixties and all it would take is a “they’re takin’ our freedumb’ armed idiot to start shooting at the military and escalate it into a massacre

 

Ain't gonna be no civil war. Street thugs are to blame. They don't even make demands.

 

What a load of BS.

 

No, actually anyone could order a rifle through the mail back then. That changed after President Kennedy was shot. Oswald ordered the rifle through the mail

 

Oh bull, here I will quote the OP, you ready? Here it is again....(large red text) ---- >

"That makes trump your personal enemy. You swore it with your life."

 

Sometimes water doesn't soak into rock so easy.

 

But there is still more guns per capital now than there was then

And more inflammatory rhetoric around guns and freedoms

 

Yeah! Otherwise we might be able to change the minds of........

 

These kids will fold when faced with real resistance. This will pass. Most black folks don't want this nonsense any more than white folks do. This is organized criminal activity and should not be tolerated. Most of the rioters are from other places and converge on cities under the guise of peaceful protesters.

 

We just have an internet now and more opinions are expressed in public than in the sixties.

 

Hmmm so?

I know that has you upset - what is the term often used to describe the reaction of democrats? “Triggered” that is it!

Truth is you can disagree with someone - even see them as an enemy but still respect them



I don’t agree with the last sentence but the first two are true.

Mind you if you consider killed to be equal to “removed from your life “ then I have “killed” a lot of posters here by simply putting them on ignore so I suppose if you take that in the loosest possible application the last sentence also applies

It comes down to the principle of “agree to disagree”

 

And sadLy this has led to an increase in peer groups and the formation of cabals especially in among the hate groups

 

They are not “kids”

Not any more

And the very fact that there are groups such as the Boogaloo Bois makes this even more fraught



Does his “camouflage” gear have pictures of palm trees and dinosaurs? Lols

Know what he is using as a penis substitute - what they all use

 

Organized crime..... Let's face the fact that the peaceful protesters see injustice and want it to end. These demands should be met. Then you have other groups using decent people's protests to further their agenda and could be compaired to the brownshirts under Hitler or blackshirts under Mussolini. The peaceful protesters have been hijacked by hate groups.

 

Just about every white male I know owns a gun or 5. Most black males are also armed. These men would be hard pressed to use a gun on another person. Bit if they did they would be deadly.... stone cold serious.

 

I’ve been monitoring the protests from various cities. There are now protests in 140 American cities and sympathetic marches in dozens of foreign cities.

In most averaged sized cities, during the day the marchers are quite peaceful, almost a celebratory attitudes, as people feel comfort and excitement in the show of support. And they number in the many thousands. In the bigger cities there are as many as sixty thousand.

Watching the video feeds from several different cities, the same pattern kept emerging. As the day, and daylight came to a close, the crowds quickly thinned down until only a trickle remained. Then more and more people began to arrive until there were a few hundred. Most seemed intent on confronting the police. After all the protests are about police misconduct. I think that the police and the criminal justice system have long been in the habit of abusing citizens. They abuse black men the most. In every city in America there have been efforts to hold the police accountable, to create citizen oversight committees. The criminal justice system and their right wing allies have resisted to the greatest degree. Even in those cities that have managed to establish citizen oversight, that oversight carries no real authority.

But then, of these few hundred, a small portion where just out to cause destruction. Often times a lone person can be seen, away from the action, just walking along, breaking windows with a hammer as he walked.

Then there was a third group, which seemed to be rather organized as they broke into and looted store after store. There are plenty of videos from places like LA, Chicago, and New York of what seems to be dozens of people pouring into stores and running out with arm loads of loot. It seemed as if athletic footwear stores were hit particularly hard.

That conservatives seem to be obsessing over the violence and looting, and blaming it all on Democrats, may be an indication that they are not getting a balanced view of the news. I think it has a lot of them checking their ammo supply.

The pattern though, had been that over time the peaceful protests have increased, in number and in size, while the violence at night has dwindled, as has the looting. It only makes sense as the police have been arresting the violent offenders, often with the assistance of the peaceful protestors. And passions have been dying down.