1). “The Military ALWAYS Sides With the Regime, Except When...: The research is surprisingly consistent”, Dec 23, 2025, Christopher Armitage, The Existentialist Republic, at < https://cmarmitage.substack.
2). “BREAKING: America’s Internal Suicide and the Capture of the Pentagon | John Mearsheimer”, Dec 24, 2025, anon, Prof John MearsheimerTalks, duration of video 23:58, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
3). “BREAKING: Republicans’ On-Stage Moment Leaves Audience Stunned | John Mearsheimer”, Dec 24, 2025, anon, Prof John MearsheimerTalks, duration of video 25:53, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
4). “Lawrence Wilkerson: Economic Collapse Will End the U.S. Empire”, Dec 24, 2025, Glen Diesen interviews Lawrence Wilkerson, Glen Diesen, duration of video 50:13, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
~~ recommended by desmond morista ~~
Introduction by desmond morista: The U.S. Empire clearly seems to be in its final days. We see a much harsher domestic socioeconomic and political regime being inexorably imposed on most of the population. Item 1). “The Military ALWAYS ….”, discusses the arrangements that far-right has already set up to impose a military regime of martial law on the U.S. Armitage does not believe the remaining institutions will actually stand up to a request for the mobilization of the U.S. military to impose harsh repression on the U.S. populace. Item 2)., “BREAKING: America’s Internal Suicide …., discusses another aspect of taking control of the U.S. military by converting it from a largely apolitical force to a hard-nosed White Christian Nationalist force.
Item 3). “BREAKING: Republicans’ On-Stage Moment ….”, discusses the struggle within the far-right as evidenced by the recent Turning Point USA meeting and the moves by J. D. Vance to build a coalition in prepartion for Trump's departure from the scene. Finally in Item 4)., “Lawrence Wilkerson: Economic Collapse ….”, Willerspm looks at the realities of the disastrous fiscal position of the U.S.. He points out that on January 1st, 2026 the U.S. will have to sell $3 Trillion of U.S. treasury bills and there are no takers. Wilkerson hopes, and discusses why he thinks, that if the U.S. ruling class plays their cards right the Chinese will be willing to help the U.S. get through this crisis; given that the U.S. acts in good faith to quit their aggressive and violent tactics. Also Europe needs to come to grips with their new, and greatly reduced position in the world.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The Military ALWAYS Sides With the Regime, Except When...
The question comes up in group chats and family dinners and late-night conversations between people who are scared. Will the military stop him. Will they refuse if he orders something truly unconscionable. Will they choose the Constitution over the commander in chief.
The answer is no. The research tells us exactly why.
I served in the Air Force. When people ask whether the military will save us, I don’t need to guess. But my experience is just one data point, and the United States in 2025 meets none of the conditions for defection and all of the conditions for loyalty.
In 2018, political scientists Aurel Croissant, David Kuehn, and Tanja Eschenauer published a study in the Journal of Democracy analyzing forty cases where authoritarian leaders faced mass protests and the military had to choose sides.¹ They examined every documented instance between 1946 and 2014. Their conclusion was blunt: “In nonviolent mass protests against dictators, the military is the ultimate arbiter of regime survival.”¹
The numbers break down like this. In nineteen cases, the military stayed loyal and helped crush the population. In fifteen cases, they defected to join the protesters. In six cases, they staged coups, replacing one authoritarian with another. The conditions that predict defection are specific and narrow.
The researchers found that “militaries who have not engaged in gross human rights abuses before the endgame have relatively less to fear from the dictator’s fall and a potential regime change, and are thus more willing to support the goals of the protesters.”¹ A dictator who pushes his officers out of power, breaking implicit agreements about shared governance, risks losing their loyalty. Sustained mass protests that appear to be winning, especially those that would require killing citizens in overwhelming numbers to suppress, create pressure to switch sides. And when the institution’s survival seems more likely under new leadership than old, self-preservation takes over.
Portugal in 1974 fits this model. Career officers exhausted by colonial wars in Africa had been alienated by promotion policies that fast-tracked conscripts to the same rank, bypassing the professional credentials they had earned through the military academy. They had no stake in the regime’s survival. When they moved against the government, the population flooded the streets with carnations and the dictatorship collapsed in hours. Romania in 1989 fits partially. The army attempted repression first, then defected only after realizing the regime could not be saved. They switched sides to survive, not out of principle.
Now look at where we stand.
The US military has committed human rights abuses continuously for seventy years. This is documented history. My Lai, where soldiers killed over five hundred Vietnamese civilians and one officer served three and a half years of house arrest. The secret bombing of Cambodia, which killed over a hundred thousand civilians in a campaign Congress didn’t know about. Laos, bombed more heavily per capita than any country in history. El Salvador, where the Pentagon trained death squads. The Highway of Death in the Gulf War. Somalia. Abu Ghraib, where soldiers photographed themselves torturing prisoners. Haditha. Bagram. Guantanamo, which remains open today. Twenty years of drone strikes on wedding parties and funerals and first responders. Iraq. Afghanistan.
There is no decade without atrocities. There is no administration with clean hands. The institution has been in the complicity column since before most Americans were born.
The correlation across research and reality of the last 70 years has a rare clarity in demonstrating that militaries with no record of human rights abuses defect, while militaries implicated in atrocities stay loyal. The US military has been implicated in atrocities for seventy years.
The boat strikes in the Caribbean, where survivors in the water were reportedly hit with second missiles, where a senior JAG warned the operations could amount to extrajudicial killings before being overruled, are onboarding rather than aberrations.² They are the latest iteration of a loyalty mechanism that has been operating for generations. Their interests and the regime’s interests have become the same thing.
Some people point to historical examples as evidence that the military will hold the line. James Schlesinger during Nixon’s final days, reportedly telling military commanders not to act on White House orders without checking with him first. Mark Milley’s back-channel calls to China reassuring them that the US would not attack. Mark Esper refusing to invoke the Insurrection Act during the 2020 protests. James Mattis resigning and later calling Trump a threat to the Constitution.
Look closer. None of these men actually refused a direct order. Schlesinger’s intervention was informal and never tested. Milley made phone calls and later said he never received an illegal order from Trump. Esper maneuvered behind the scenes and then got fired. Mattis resigned and wrote an article. Friction that got managed, not defection. When the system faced pressure, it produced private concerns, quiet maneuvering, and eventual departures. It did not produce institutional resistance. The military’s track record of refusing unlawful orders in ways that actually prevented harm is effectively nonexistent.
And now they are engineering even that friction out of the system.
By December 2025, more than twenty senior officers had been fired or forced into retirement.³ General C.Q. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, removed with over two years remaining on his term. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as Chief of Naval Operations and the first woman on the Joint Chiefs, fired. General Timothy Haugh, head of the NSA and Cyber Command, dismissed one day after far-right activist Laura Loomer met with Trump to discuss disloyal staff.⁴ The Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, the lawyers who would advise commanders on the lawfulness of orders, all removed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained why: he wanted to eliminate “roadblocks.”³
But they are not stopping at purges. Hegseth has ordered a twenty percent reduction in all four-star generals and admirals, roughly one hundred positions eliminated.⁵ The Pentagon is preparing plans to consolidate major commands, reducing the number of independent power centers where resistance might originate. Officers have been threatened with polygraph tests to identify anyone talking to the press.⁶ Hegseth told those who remained that if they do not like Trump’s policies, they should “do the honorable thing and resign.”⁷ Multiple witnesses reported hearing Trump say he needs “the kind of Generals that Hitler had.”⁸
They are restructuring the institution itself to guarantee compliance. Fewer senior officers means fewer friction points. Consolidated commands mean fewer people who could push back. Removing legal advisors means no one left to say an order is unlawful. Polygraph threats mean silence. Public firings mean everyone else gets the message.
Admiral Alvin Holsey commanded US Southern Command until he questioned the legality of the Caribbean strikes. According to the Wall Street Journal, Hegseth told him: “You’re either on the team or you’re not. When you get an order, you move out fast and don’t ask questions.”⁹ Holsey announced his retirement one year into his command. Marine Colonel Paul Meagher, SOUTHCOM’s senior JAG, warned before the strikes began that they could amount to extrajudicial killings.² He was overruled by the Justice Department. Multiple uniformed lawyers have told reporters they do not believe the strikes are lawful. None of them can stop what is happening.
When six members of Congress told service members they could refuse illegal orders, Trump called it seditious behavior punishable by death.¹⁰ The Pentagon opened a misconduct review against Mark Kelly for advising troops of rights they already have.¹¹ They’re going far out of their way to send the message, because they know how important a compliant military is in effective authoritarian consolidation.
They are systematically dismantling the infrastructure for refusal. The lawyers who would say an order is unlawful have been fired or sidelined. The commanders who would push back have been removed. The service members who might hesitate have been shown what happens to those who question. And they are restructuring the institution to ensure that even if someone wanted to resist, the mechanisms for doing so no longer exist.
Some will point to surveys showing that eighty percent of troops understand their duty to disobey unlawful orders. Researchers asked people if they would do the right thing, and people said they would. That tells us nothing. This data is meaningless.
Stanley Milgram demonstrated decades ago that people dramatically overestimate their willingness to resist authority in hypothetical scenarios. In his experiments, sixty-five percent of participants administered what they believed were lethal electrical shocks to strangers because a man in a lab coat told them to. When actually placed in situations where obedience conflicts with conscience, compliance rates are high and consistent.¹²
What matters is not what troops tell pollsters. What matters is what happened at My Lai. What matters is what happened at Abu Ghraib. What matters is what happened to Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who stopped the massacre by positioning his aircraft between American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians and ordering his gunner to fire on US troops if they continued. Thompson was called a traitor. He received death threats. A congressman tried to have him court-martialed for turning his guns on American soldiers. The Army didn’t acknowledge what he did for thirty years. The system protects those who comply. It destroys those who resist.
If you think they wouldn’t do it here, to Americans, on American soil: Kent State. May 4, 1970. Ohio National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds into a crowd of unarmed students in thirteen seconds. Four dead. Nine wounded. One paralyzed for life. Two of the dead weren’t even protesters. The Scranton Commission called it “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.”¹³ No one was convicted.
And it is not hypothetical anymore. Since June 2025, the administration has deployed nearly ten thousand troops to American cities. Los Angeles received 4,700 personnel, including 700 active-duty Marines sent over the governor’s objection.¹⁴ Washington D.C. received more than 2,200 National Guard from eleven Republican-led states.¹⁵ Chicago. Portland. Memphis. A federal judge ruled the Los Angeles deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act, the first such injunction since the law was enacted in 1878.¹⁴ The Pentagon is building a nationwide “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” with over 23,000 troops operational by January.¹⁶ Internal National Guard documents obtained by the Washington Post described the mission as “leveraging fear” and “driving a wedge between citizens and the military.”¹⁷ Troops reported feeling “shame.”¹⁷ The documents acknowledged “extremely high” risk to civilians.¹⁷ Trump’s response to legal challenges was a Cabinet meeting declaration: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”¹⁸
They deployed anyway.
The architects of this system have been at work for decades to build a military that could eventually serve to protect those dismantling our democracy in service of the rich and powerful.
Henry Kissinger, who ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia. The CIA directors who oversaw coups in Chile and Guatemala and Iran. The defense secretaries who authorized torture programs. The presidents who signed off on drone strikes knowing civilians would die. The generals who implemented these policies and retired to defense contractor boards. The members of Congress who kept funding wars they knew were built on lies. The executives at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and General Dynamics who lobbied for conflicts because conflicts are profitable.
Every name on that list made choices. Many of them are still alive. Many of them are still wealthy. Many of them are still respected. They are the enemies of accountability and the allies of corruption.
Every drone strike that went unpunished, every torture program that resulted in no prosecutions, every war crime that ended with a pardon or a quiet retirement added another layer to the wall between the military and accountability. The architects of American foreign policy spent seventy years compromising a primary institution for checking authoritarian power. Whether they knew what they were building or simply didn’t care, the result is the same.
The conditions that predict defection do not exist here. Leadership is being replaced with loyalists faster than anyone can track. Legal advisors have been purged. The military benefits from this regime and is being empowered by it rather than pushed aside.
If you are waiting for the military to save us, you will wait forever.
So who is left?
Each other. The recognition that no institution is coming to rescue us, that the cavalry is not arriving, that the people who will protect our communities are the people already in them. Mutual aid. Local organizing. City and state-level resistance where possible. The often hard, slow, and unglamorous task of building power from the ground because the institutions we hoped might intervene were compromised decades before most of us were born.
The military will not choose the Constitution. They will follow orders. The history says so. The structure says so. Everything happening this year says so. The science says so. The only variable that matters now is what we do with that knowledge.
So if you’re asking yourself “this is all horrible, what do I do about it?”
The Existentialist Republic has good news. We are not helpless in the face of autocratic consolidation, you have tremendous power and change for the better can happen.
The Introduction to Soft Secession booklet explains the framework.
The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare shows how states can use fiscal policy as leverage.
The Educate Activate Recruit Repeat Method lays out how movements grow.
Being Dangerous: How to Go from Activist to Operative
There’s a printable trifold pamphlet you can hand to anyone who needs a primer on soft secession.
If you want merch or physical copies, you can find those at TheExistentialistRepublic.com
Thanks for reading and for wanting to make the world a better place.
References
Croissant, A., Kuehn, D., & Eschenauer, T. (2018). Mass protests and the military. Journal of Democracy, 29(3), 141-155. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2018.0051
Bertrand, N., Liebermann, O., & Cohen, Z. (2025, August). Top military lawyer raised legal concerns about boat strikes. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/top-military-lawyer-raised-legal-concerns-boat-strikes-rcna243694
Britzky, H., & Bertrand, N. (2025, February 21). Trump administration fires top US general and Navy chief in unprecedented purge of military leadership. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/21/politics/trump-fires-top-us-general-cq-brown
Bertrand, N., & Cohen, Z. (2025, April 4). Gen. Timothy Haugh fired as NSA director one day after Laura Loomer met with Trump. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/04/politics/timothy-haugh-fired-nsa-cyber-command
Britzky, H., & Bertrand, N. (2025, May 5). Hegseth orders Pentagon to cut number of senior generals by 20%. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/05/politics/hegseth-orders-pentagon-cut-senior-generals
Youssef, N. A., & Ward, A. (2025, April 24). Hegseth threatened to polygraph top military officers. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pete-hegseth-pentagon-fired-aides-cfa9e0d5
Britzky, H., Cohen, Z., & Bertrand, N. (2025, September 30). Hegseth pushes to remake the military in his preferred image. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/politics/hegseth-speech-culture-standards
Goldberg, J. (2024, October 22). Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.’ The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/
Youssef, N. A., & Ward, A. (2025, October). Hegseth asked Admiral Holsey to step down over boat strikes. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/hegseth-holsey-boat-strikes
PBS NewsHour. (2025, November 19). Trump says Democrats’ video message to military is ‘seditious behavior’ punishable by death. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-democrats-video-message-to-military-is-seditious-behavior-punishable-by-death
Kheel, R. (2025, November 24). Pentagon threatens to court-martial senator who told troops they can refuse ‘illegal orders.’ Task & Purpose. https://taskandpurpose.com/news/pentagon-mark-kelly-review/
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040525
President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. (1970). The report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. U.S. Government Printing Office.
Levine, M. (2025, September 2). Judge says Trump administration’s use of US military in Los Angeles violated federal law. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/02/politics/national-guard-california-trump-posse-comitatus-act-breyer
Shapiro, A. (2025, December 17). Court rules that National Guard troops can stay in D.C. – for now. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/17/nx-s1-5647680/federal-court-says-troops-can-stay-in-d-c-and-hints-at-prolonged-deployment
Przybyla, H. (2025, October 31). National Guard told to create ‘quick reaction forces’ for civil unrest. Military Times. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2025/10/31/national-guard-told-to-create-quick-reaction-forces-for-civil-unrest/
Lamothe, D., & Dawsey, J. (2025, September 10). National Guard documents show public ‘fear,’ troops’ ‘shame’ over D.C. presence. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/09/10/national-guard-trump-dc/
The New Republic. (2025, August 26). Trump just said exactly what a dictator would say. https://newrepublic.com/post/199653/trump-just-said-exactly-dictator-say
xxxxxxxxxxx
- 2). “BREAKING: America’s Internal Suicide and the Capture of the Pentagon | John Mearsheimer”, Dec 24, 2025, anon, Prof John MearsheimerTalks, duration of video 23:58, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=9l0AIQlDLSQ >.
No comments:
Post a Comment