TV News LIES

Elon Musk on Wednesday suggested retired Army Lt. Col Alexander Vindman “committed treason” and “will pay” after the former Trump impeachment witness accused the tech billionaire and close Trump ally of being unwittingly used by Russia.

“Vindman is on the payroll of Ukranian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X, responding to comments Vindman made in an interview about Musk’s reported conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A Pentagon-funded study relied on old data to conclude extremism isn’t a major problem in the U.S. military, according to a new analysis. Meanwhile, incoming President Trump reportedly plans to sign an executive order removing thousands of trans service members from the military. And body camera footage shows locals in Columbus, OH, fought back when neo-Nazis came to town.

Over the last few years, USA TODAY has closely followed the Pentagon’s approach to tackling extremism in the armed forces. In 2021, weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced a big push to weed extremists out of the military, but as USA TODAY reported, that push largely fell apart in the years that followed.

In September 1956, Cpl Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt.

Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, Jones never saw combat. Instead, he served in the cold war, where the threats to his life were all American.

The previous year, Jones was one of thousands of US troops directly exposed to radiation during aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.

Now he was being exposed again, this time to lab-made “simulated nuclear fallout”, material that emitted some of the same ionizing radiation as the atomic bomb. The exercise at Camp Stoneman, near Pittsburg, California, was one of many in a years-long program conducted by a key military research facility, headquartered at a navy shipyard in a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.

More...

President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that he would declare a national emergency and use the military to execute his mass deportation plans.

Conservative activist Tom Fitton said earlier this month on social media that "reports are incoming" that Trump is "prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program."

Trump reposted Fitton's post Monday with the comment "TRUE!!!"

During his campaign, Trump repeatedly promised a "mass deportation" that would round up immigrants around the country who have violated the law.

"The Trump world has been very deliberately – or sloppily, depending on your point of view – mashing together the border and mass deportations," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. "They are two different topics."

More...

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Army veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary breaks longstanding tradition of Pentagon chiefs with long careers in government, industry and the military.

That appears to be Trump’s aim: a Washington outsider who will shake up what he considers a hidebound institution that didn’t always do what he wanted in his first administration, according to military experts and current and former Defense officials. Hegseth has laid down markers on his agenda for running the Pentagon: firing generals who promote “woke” military policies, eliminating combat roles for women, and loosening reins on troops conduct in combat.

Trump’s transition team has a “warrior board” executive order ready for the president-elect’s desk.

An executive order draft is floating around MAGA world that would establish a Trump-appointed “warrior board” with the power to purge any three- or four-star generals as it sees fit. The board would send its dismissal recommendations to Trump and they would be acted upon within 30 days.