Stolen Pentagon docs: Dangerous radicalization of American white youth now a national security threat
The photograph, in retrospect, seems quaint. Taken in 1969 it depicts helmeted SDS Weathermen marching through the streets of Chicago during their “Days of Rage” demonstration. It shows young men and women, most of them college students or college age, who were radicalized by the war in Vietnam. The slogan for the demonstration, which lasted for three days in October, was “bring the war home.”
That is as good a description as any for what Jack Teixeira, who is about the age of the Weathermen radicals, did when he stole top secret documents from his job as a junior airman in the Air National Guard and posted them on a gamers’ chat group on the social media site Discord. The documents, largely slides and pages from top secret briefing books for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, contained reams of information about the war in Ukraine and the role the United States is playing in support of its army there. Dozens of the documents found their way from the chat room on Discord onto Telegram, a social media site similar to Twitter, that is used by the Russian intelligence services and the Russian military.
Not much is known about Teixeira’s motive in stealing the documents and posting them. Teixeira, described as anti-war by young members of his chat group, name it “Thug Shaker Central,” apparently as a racist joke playing on a hip-hop phrase which refers to young black men performing a “rump shaker” dance to popular rap songs. Reports about posts on the chat group say that members shared racist and antisemitic jokes and memes. According to the Washington Post, whose reporters interviewed a teenage member of the group and saw more than 300 secret documents shared on Discord, Teixeira posted a video of himself wearing protective glasses and ear covers at a shooting range. “He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target,” the Post reported.
This is my bi-weekly column in Salon. For the rest of the column, go here:
So he's anti-war but plays war games
Uses racial slurs but likes cultural appropriation
He's a "Christian" but worships guns
Cognitive Dissonance is dead
So much to think about. For starters, this kid is Rittenhouse redux: a bratty kid lionized by morons for actions that, pre-Trump, would have been seen as abhorrent. As for
MTG and Tucker taking him up, please remember that MTG is looking for publicity in all the wrong places (and getting it) and Tucker sometimes says things meant to play to his audience of MAGAts, as we learned from the Fox lawsuit. Perhaps overlooked is that the powers that be gave this kid a top secret clearance not for his foreign policy chops but for his i.t. abilities. Some msm are missing this.
What's going on now is equivalent to giving an electrician in a bank the combination. Adults, apply within.