[For all his youth and naivete, Jack Teixeira represents a sizable
government-skeptical force that works in or adjacent to the U.S.
government. Many of these right-wing and extreme libertarian
individuals can be found in the military.]
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THE MOST DANGEROUS SECURITY THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES  
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John Feffer
April 19, 2023
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ For all his youth and naivete, Jack Teixeira represents a sizable
government-skeptical force that works in or adjacent to the U.S.
government. Many of these right-wing and extreme libertarian
individuals can be found in the military. _

Security Threat Assessment level, Dungu, DRC, by Oxfam International
(CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license)

 

If you take a poll of American pundits and policymakers about the
greatest threat facing the U.S. government, they’d probably put
China at the top of the list. Maybe a handful would opt for Russia. A
few holdouts from the War on Terrorism era might point to Islamic
extremism.

But the greatest threat to the U.S. government is actually Junior
Airman Jack Teixeira.

The 21-year-old behind the leak of U.S. intelligence documents might
seem like just a guy who wanted to win a few points with his buddies
in an on-line discussion group. Sharing insider information to
demonstrate his street cred was, of course, an extraordinarily stupid
thing to do. But Teixeira was no whistleblower like Chelsea Manning or
Reality Winner. He shared the documents in the belief that they
wouldn’t go beyond the relatively small circle of gamers in his chat
group Thug Shaker Central on the Discord platform.

So, how much of a threat could that be?

For all his youth and naivete, Teixeira represents a sizable
government-skeptical force that works in or adjacent to the U.S.
government. Many of these right-wing and extreme libertarian
individuals can be found in the military. Others are elected
representatives—from school boards up to the U.S.
Congress—motivated to run for office by Donald Trump or his
extremist predecessors. They would never characterize themselves as
anti-American. But in their mind, government is not really part of
America—not _their_ America, not the _real_ America.

This version of nationalism stripped of any love of government is only
part of the ideological picture.

Teixeira was embedded in the right-wing gamer culture that has taken
aim at women, minorities, and the presumed “deep state” through
“trolling” and “doxxing” (calling in false reports to police
and SWAT teams). Right-wing recruitment takes place
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the chat of first-person shooter games and on social media
applications like Discord, a platform for gamers since 2015 and also a
popular meeting place for extremists. The organizers of the Unite the
Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, for instance, used Discord
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plan the event, while the white supremacist behind the Buffalo mass
shooting last year used Discord to communicate his thoughts through a
personal diary.

Discord: what a perfect name for a communications platform that has
divided the country even as it has united the right.

It’s not easy to figure out Teixeira’s actual views. According
to _The Washington Post_
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_[M]embers of Teixeira’s server have showed The Post video of
Teixeira shouting racist and antisemitic slurs before firing a rifle
and said he referenced government raids at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and in
Waco, Tex.—events with deep resonance among right-wing,
anti-government extremists._

Another _Post _piece provides more insight
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Teixeira’s worldview:

_[H]e spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and
the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to
suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about
“government overreach.” [He] told his online companions that the
government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according
to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white
supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo
supermarket in May 2022… [He] said federal law enforcement officials
let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a
baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an
example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government
corruption._

The links between the U.S. military and the far right go back many
years, though it’s hard to know just how deep the relationship
really is. Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City
bombing in 1995, was a decorated veteran but developed his
anti-government views largely outside the military. Between 2001 and
2013, , according to New America Foundation data, 21 veterans
were involved in committing or planning
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violence. A Florida National Guard member, who was the co-founder of
the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, was convicted in 2018
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possessing explosive materials (released from prison, he plotted to
bomb a power station in Maryland and was re-arrested
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Veterans were also overrepresented
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the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.

According to an October 2020 Pentagon report
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the inroads made by white supremacists in the military, “U.S.
military personnel and veterans are ‘highly prized’ recruits for
supremacist groups, and leaders of those groups try to join the
military themselves and get those already in their groups to enlist.
Their goal is to obtain weapons and skills and to try to borrow the
military’s bravado and cachet.”

In her 2020 congressional testimony
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Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism
reported that the

_Armed Services’ own soldiers know that white supremacy in the ranks
is a serious problem. A Military Times poll in 2017 found that nearly
25 percent of actively serving military personnel have encountered
white nationalism and racism in the Armed Forces. Active duty troops
were about 1.3 million at the time, meaning some 325,000 soldiers had
encountered white nationalism in some form. Follow up surveys in 2018
and 2019 by the same publication found substantially the same
troubling results._

Before the 1970s, such white nationalism and racism would have
overlapped substantially with official U.S. government policy. But
now, in the wake of the civil rights, affirmative action, and
#BlackLivesMatter movements, this extremism has acquired a distinctly
anti-government character. Unlike in Germany
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Zealand
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the U.S. government has not made much of an effort to eliminate this
potential fifth column from the military’s ranks.

REPUBLICANS TO THE RESCUE

Given the ideological affinities, It’s no surprise that the far
right has come to Teixeitra’s defense. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
(R-GA) has supported
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for being “white, male, christian and anti-war,” which “makes
him an enemy to the Biden regime.” She goes on: “Ask yourself who
is the real enemy. A young low level national guardsmen? Or the
administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation,
against nuclear Russia without war powers?”

Fox’s Tucker Carlson, too, has sided
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Teixeira and Russia against both Ukraine and the Biden administration:

_Just two weeks ago, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin
told the U.S. Senate that Russian military power is “waning.” In
other words, Russia is losing the war. That was a lie. He knew it was
when he said it, but he repeated it in congressional testimony. That
is a crime, but Lloyd Austin has not been arrested for committing that
crime. Instead, the only man who has been taken into custody or likely
ever will be is a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who
leaked the slides that showed that Lloyd Austin was lying. He revealed
the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal._

The Pentagon has been consistently pessimistic about Ukraine’s
ability to win the war outright, and some of that pessimism has even
been expressed publicly
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The leaks have only confirmed that less-than-sanguine viewpoint. But
that doesn’t mean that Russia is winning the war. Quite the
contrary. The Kremlin’s attempt this winter and early spring to
seize the entire Donbas region resulted only in the acquisition of a
few square miles of scorched earth.

Carlson, of course, is not interested in the truth, only in
Biden-bashing and leading the charge against the U.S. government more
generally. Even when Trump was putatively in charge of the federal
government, the extreme right and its media darlings managed to
maintain their anti-government stance by transferring their animus to
a “deep state” that they’d invented largely for that purpose.
Look to Trump, indicted but still in the running, to exploit this
extreme libertarianism in his campaign to be reelected in 2024.

WHAT THE LEAKS REVEAL

The essential contents of the documents that Teixeira leaked is
yesterday’s news. Ukraine is running low on missiles to defend
itself against Russian aerial attacks, it has limited resources that
it can use in its long-awaited spring counter-offensive, and Russia is
having an equally difficult time dealing with the loss of troops and
dissension within its own ranks.

The leaks don’t reveal anything about Ukraine’s upcoming
counter-offensive because the government in Kyiv hasn’t shared that
information with Washington—obviously a wise move given the porous
nature of the U.S. intelligence community. The documents don’t
identify the specific sources of Russian intel. They don’t uncover
any major behind-the-scenes funding of the Kremlin’s war efforts,
though the Chinese promised to provide
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military assistance disguised as civilian shipments and Egypt
was planning to send
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rockets on the sly.

Some revelations outside the Ukrainian front are indeed new—for
instance, about China’s supersonic drone capabilities
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others have been relatively small bore. The allies have some Special
Forces on the ground in Ukraine, including 14 from the United States
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what they’re doing, but given the Biden administration’s extreme
caution
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engaging Russian forces directly, they might be there only to
facilitate a rapid evacuation of embassy personnel if things should
suddenly go south. Israel might reverse
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position on providing lethal aid to Ukraine—but then again, it might
not. The United States has been spying
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ally South Korea, but that’s not a surprise after the Snowden-era
revelations about Washington listening in on German Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s cell phone.

What’s most surprising about the revelations is that a 21-year-old
airman, a low-level computer tech at an Air National Guard base in
Sandwich, Massachusetts, had access to these documents and could so
easily bring them home to be copied. It’s a surprise to me, at
least. But it’s apparently not so surprising to those familiar with
the intelligence community who, according to _The New York Times_
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“say untold thousands of troops and government civilians have access
to top secret materials, including many young, inexperienced workers
the military relies on to process the monumental amount of
intelligence it collects.” They just log on to the Joint Worldwide
Intelligence Communications System and boom: secrets at their
fingertips.

The sad truth is that the edifice of U.S. intelligence is so huge that
it must rely on the services of the young and the restless. It’s not
just the intelligence community. Every administration must deal with
loose lips. The Trump administration sprang leaks in every direction
and went to great lengths to try to plug them
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Given the sheer number of opportunities and motivations, it’s
surprising that more sensitive materials aren’t floating around the
Internet.

Anti-government sentiment—in the military, in the political realm,
among the public—adds something new to the equation. It’s
happening not so much on the left, where it was a feature of the
1960s, but on the far right. Once confined to the fringes of American
life, this far right is now committed to gaining power through
government institutions like school boards and the National Guard.

That’s why Jack Teixeira is such a threat. Leakers will come and go.
But far-right groomers and their recruits are in it for the long haul.
The next time that an extremist president tries to overturn an
election or seize power through illegal means, a radicalized military
might not stay in the barracks to defend the constitution while a
Congress led by Greene and her ilk might just roll over and die.

* Right-wing politics
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