Illinois Guardsmen Object To Orders... From Trump, Not Pentagon
The story cheers on Guardsmen ready to resist a future, theoretical domestic deployment under Trump. What it conspicuously avoids mentioning is the decades of actual, very real deployments overseas, often for highly questionable objectives, that these same Guard units readily fulfill. Where was this principled stand when thousands of Illinois Guard members were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan,
operations that fundamentally shape what the military 'signed up to do'? Funny how a 'threatened Guard operation' (that is, an imagined one) gets more media scrutiny than the drone strikes or foreign occupations that have defined their service for years, all conveniently greenlit by bipartisan consensus. Perhaps their ethical compass only activates when a commander-in-chief they dislike might ask
them to do something unpopular at home. Or perhaps, just maybe, the media finds it easier to celebrate defiance against a perpetually controversial figure than to critically examine the military-industrial complex's continuous churn, regardless of who occupies the White House. The hypocrisy, much like presidential war powers, expands to fit the narrative.