Leaked US Army briefing slide calls pro-life organizations ‘terrorist groups’

[Stone]

Leaked US Army briefing slide calls pro-life organizations ‘terrorist groups’
The slide, reportedly from a terrorism briefing at Fort Liberty, names the pro-life organizations National Right to Life Committee and Operation Rescue as ‘terrorist groups,’ characterized by their opposition to abortion and Roe v. Wade (misspelled ‘Row’).

Jul 11, 2024
FORT LIBERTY, North Carolina (LifeSiteNews [slightly adapted]) — Military officials under the Biden administration continue to teach that their peaceful political opponents are violent extremists, according to a report about a terrorism presentation given to U.S. Army members at Fort Liberty (the renamed Fort Bragg).

Sam Shoemate, an independent journalist and self-described “advocate for service members seeking justice,” posted to X/Twitter Wednesday evening a photograph of a slide he said was shown during an anti-terrorism briefing at Fort Bragg, right after one about the Islamist terror group ISIS.

The slide names the pro-life groups National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) and Operation Rescue (OR) as “terrorist groups,” characterized by their opposition to abortion and Roe v. Wade (misspelled “Row”). It lists various types of peaceful activism pro-life groups typically practice.

The bottom two bullet points are partially obscured, but “Bombing of Clinics” and “Attempted Murders” can be read. Left-wing activists have long attempted to tar pro-lifers as a whole with the rare violent acts of a few, which mainstream pro-life activists and organizations have always overwhelmingly condemned. Especially in recent years, pro-abortion violence has been far more common than anti-abortion violence, as admitted by FBI Director Christopher Wray in November 2022.

The slide also shows an example of a “Choose Life” license plate, which are available in many states and the proceeds from which typically go to support local pro-life organizations.

“The military and Dept of Defense are insanely out of control,” Shoemate said. “Service-members are being indoctrinated to view Pro-Life groups as the enemy.” In a follow-up post, he noted that attendees told him the violent leftist group Antifa was not mentioned as an example of domestic “terrorists.”

The Blaze investigative journalist Steve Baker reached out to Shoemate to discuss the story privately, and later posted that the story’s authenticity had been confirmed to his satisfaction.

The presentation is far from the first instance of military officials attempting to stigmatize right-of-center political views, or more generally turning its attention to the domestic political and cultural priorities of liberals at the expense of the Armed Forces’ historical mission of defending the nation.

The steady rise of “woke” ideology within the military, which has persisted and grown since the Clinton years despite the presidencies of Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump, has been intensified by current President Joe Biden, who upon taking office quickly moved to open the military to recruits suffering from gender dysphoria in a reversal of Trump administration policy, then had his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin launch a review of supposed “domestic extremism” within the military that many saw as a pretext to purge conservative views from the ranks.

In March 2023, the Center for Military Readiness (CMR) published an update on the administration’s work to infuse the armed forces with left-wing gender ideology, ranging from enforcement of preferred pronouns, to allowing cross-dressing and the use of opposite-sex showers and restrooms on military bases, to making it harder to access information on the negative consequences of such policies. Last November, the Pentagon requested an additional $114.7 million for diversity programs in the upcoming fiscal year, representing a total of $269.2 million in taxpayer dollars just on military diversity since Biden took office.

Until December 2022, Biden’s Pentagon leaders also enforced COVID-19 shot mandates on American service men and women, provoking lawsuits and threatening soldier and pilot shortages in the tens of thousands, which only added to broader problems of force strength, troop morale, and public confidence.

Such priorities have taken their toll. During a Pentagon press briefing in April 2022 on the Army’s budget for Fiscal Year 2023, Under Secretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo announced the Army had “proactively made a decision to temporarily reduce our end strength from 485,000 Soldiers to 476,000 in FY ’22, and 473,000 in FY ’23.” The Military Times reported at the time that this “could leave the service at its smallest size since 1940, when it had just over 269,000 troops.”

Gallup and Ronald Reagan Institute polls have both shown that the public has lost confidence in the military’s leaders, which presumably also has a significant effect on prospective soldiers’ willingness to sign up.