Article from the Colorado Springs Gazette about Matt:
As the commander of a missile warning unit, Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier felt responsible to report threats foreign and domestic before they harm the people of the country he loves and defends. He wrote a bestselling book and spoke out against anti-american, Marxist radicalization of military personnel he has witnessed in his role as commander of the 11th Space Warning Squadron of Space Force, at Colorado’s Buckley Air Force Base.
In return for trying to expose what he considers a clear and present threat to national security running through all branches of the military, Lohmeier was relieved of duty on May 14 by Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting.
“I didn’t know the intent of that meeting, but I had my suspicion,” Lohmeier explained during a recent visit with The Gazette’s editorial board. “He said ‘I have seen your podcast and you have been politically partisan while acting in an official capacity,’ which I to this day deny. The second reason he cited is that I was publicly critical of the policies of my chain of command.”
Though the Defense Department announced an investigation of his “prohibited partisan political activity,” Lohmeier says he merely exposed increasingly institutionalized and mandatory left-wing political activity. He said the movement blatantly favors Democratic politicians, policies and ideologies.
“Military professionals have an obligation to be nonpolitical and that’s for good reason,” Lohmeier said. “We shouldn’t be political, and that includes me. I genuinely believe that. It is wise counsel and obligation, and that’s why I’m doing this.”
Lohmeier gives detailed accounts, in his book and in discussions, of emails, memos and down-day workshops that tell young military recruits and officers this country is a place of white “oppressors” and minorities oppressed by whites. They are lectured from and told to read passages of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which pretends the United States was founded by the arrival of a slave ship and has grown as a culture of oppression ever since.
Lohmeier said service people are taught critical race theory, which characterizes the United States as a country of whites oppressing Blacks and other minorities.
“They’re taught about white groups of people versus Black groups of people — or, pick your oppressed group — and there’s this constant narrative that whites can’t help but be racist against Blacks so we need to disabuse them of their microaggressions and reeducate them in how to be anti-racist,” Lohmeier said. “We need to help white people understand that whether they think they’re racist or not they have implicit and unconscious biases that cause them to put Blacks or other minorities in a terrible position, even in our armed forces.”
Lohmeier believes it makes service personnel hate the country they are supposed to risk their lives defending. It divides personnel, who have more traditionally overlooked race to focus on a common purpose of defending freedom protected by a country they all would die for.
“I had a young Black female in my office saying ‘I’m beginning to learn that I’m not only an outsider in my country but I’m an outsider in the service.’ She had never been brought up to believe any of that, but a short time in the military had changed her entire perspective of her country. She said she had been trained to believe that whites are out to get her. I had to disabuse her of the fact she is not an outsider in this service,” Lohmeier said.
Lohmeier describes a slow and methodical anti-american, racially charged “radicalization” that began long ago and typically failed to gain traction. He believes it reached a tipping point after a white Minneapolis cop killed Black suspect George Floyd during an arrest on May 25, 2020.
“A host of military service members have not only become political they have been exceptionally radicalized to the left side of the political spectrum and they speak up without being held accountable for their radical views,” Lohmeier said.
He has examples, including enlisted personnel using social media to advocate burning down cities. He has screenshots of personnel posting “cops are bastards,” “f— all cops,” and more. Often he sees personnel conducting political activism while in uniform, clearly violating Department of Defense rules without consequence.
“Some took to social media while President Donald Trump was their commander in chief so they could compare him to Hitler,” Lohmeier said. “I see that kind of activism going unchecked. If you criticize those who have become political, to call them out for politically partisan activities, the standard retort is that those of us who say anything about it are racists or unsympathetic. What I witnessed is hyperpoliticization of the military work environment yet calling it out is considered partisan.”
At first, Lohmeier went through the chain of command by documenting political activism in writing. He filed a complaint with the Space Force Office of the Inspector General, but his concerns were immediately dismissed without explanation.
“People were being divided at the ground level in an operational squadron because of politics and political ideologies which I recognized as Marxist,” Lohmeier said. “I’m talking critical race theory, woke culture, political correctness, all of that. I thought nothing I do internally seems to be fixing this problem. So, I’ll write a book about it. Then, fortunately, I had an injunction from the secretary of defense that came on Feb.
5 of this year saying that if you witness any extremism or radicalism you have an obligation to speak up and help educate fellow service members. I thought, ‘Hey, that’s great because I’ve been writing about it and I plan to do just that.’ ”
To avoid the mere appearance of subversive behavior, Lohmeier discussed his book with Space Force public affairs officials and lawyers. He sought counsel from another active-duty lieutenant colonel and author and learned the military’s requirements for books published by active-duty personnel.
“I made sure I wasn’t doing something illegal,” Lohmeier said. “I wanted to get the issue out. So, I did all of that and then I was the one accused of being politically partisan and I was fired in an instant. I understand that it brings embarrassment to the Defense Department. Well, that was my best judgment of what needed to be done to solve what is potentially an irreversible situation within the armed forces if it doesn’t get fixed really quick. Radical leftist rhetoric is accepted, excused, and encouraged and any criticism of that activism is considered partisan. That is a dangerous spot for our armed forces to be in.”
His book, “Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military,” contains at least 60 pages that document examples of radical political activity in the military.
He tells of his base commander sending out two 90-minute documentaries, asking personnel to watch them in advance of a downday discussion about race.
The videos feature interviews with Marxist revolutionaries, including Melina Abdullah who founded the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter and picketed the home of the first Black woman to head the District Attorney’s Office of Los Angeles.
“The videos demonize Republican officials by name, such as (Senate Minority Leader) Mitch Mcconnell, saying he can’t help his white supremacy,” Lohmeier recalls. “One video mentions Donald Trump, who was sitting commander in chief of the armed services, saying he contributes to a white ruling class that Democratic leaders are trying to help the country escape from. Then it mentions Bill and Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama as virtuous, lovely, praiseworthy, and everything good in this world because they are trying to help Blacks escape from the oppression of whites.”
Lohmeier said the overtly partisan propaganda videos, emails, memos, and downday discussions have changed the military’s culture. Instead of a unified force devoted to one country, people want to debate each other and others want to quit.
“Service members I talk to of high and low rank are losing their desire to serve in the forces, regardless of their political views,” Lohmeier said.
“If they’re left-leaning they tend to buy into the narrative that America is an evil place and a place of inescapable racism with an oppressor class of whites who have formed a culture and laws only to benefit themselves. They start to question whether this country is worthy to defend. One active-duty social justice activist, who’s a lieutenant colonel, said on his Facebook page that we need to topple and dismantle the United States and bring about revolution. If that’s what you believe, you don’t want to serve in the armed forces defending this country. You’ve got bigger fish to fry and you want to join the revolution. If you’re conservative, you grow tired of being called a racist. The one trusted institution that has historically been nonpartisan, the American military, is participating in partisan politics constantly.”
One of Lohmeier’s chapters documents the communist origins of critical race theory, and the Marxist tactic of dividing and conquering societies.
“Marx’s economic class stratification of the working and ruling class doesn’t always fit,” Lohmeier explains. “Marxists in the West in the 1930s and ’40s were very disappointed that Western society seemed reluctant to embrace that narrative. So, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, they started to adopt a different oppressor versus oppressed and it was all about race. All the while we were making progress on those fronts they were eager to capitalize on the very narrative that they knew would be very divisive in this country and that is our tough history of racism, of oppression, of slavery.
“Those are sensitive issues to the American people because they are incompatible with our founding philosophy. And, so you’re able to abuse and weaponize those narratives in order to create victimhood on the one hand and then an oppressor class on the other, and then insist that the victim class has an obligation to use violent force to throw off the oppressor class. That turns into race wars. So, if history is at all telling of what the outcome of Marxist ideology is, it is to get people’s blood boiling enough so they hate each other and they show up and protest, get violent, and they smash windows and shout and yell enough in order for people to start throwing punches or stabbing or shooting each other.”
Lohmeier believes the violent left-wing protests that swept through the country in 2020 could be the metaphorical tip of the iceberg if the military, school systems, colleges and universities, corporations, and other institutions continue embracing the oppressor-victim narrative that undermines love for the United States.
“If it starts again and you have another Kenosha (Wisconsin) in 2021 or 22 with the bloodshed of 25 or 30 people, that can spread very rapidly to cities throughout the country,” Lohmeier said.
“Then, depending on how that goes, it could subside or there could be no end to it. As a trained strategist in the Defense Department, I look not just at foreign enemies but at domestic enemies. I see what this impulse leads to. It has the potential to unravel civil society and lead to violence domestically,” he said.
“If you’re military is polarized and fractured like American society, how do you unify as a force in order to fight your nation’s battles either abroad or domestically? You don’t. You have certain people who agree and others who disagree and then they’re empowered to either obey or not obeyed the orders, and that’s a dangerous situation for this country and the world.”
First published in The Colorado Springs Gazette via FrontPage Magazine
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