In June, the Army issued two new directives regarding the handling and reporting of “protest, extremist and criminal gang activities” by soldiers. Army directive 2024-07 on handling extremist activity, as well as the service’s directive 2024-08 on reporting extremist activity, can both be found on the website of the Army Inspector General.

WorldNetDaily interviewed Dr. Charles “Chase” Spears, recently retired after a 20-year Army public affairs career specializing in ethical military communication strategy.

“Since day one of his tenure as secretary of Defense,” Spears told WND, “Lloyd Austin claimed that there is a major issue with [Christian] extremism in the military.” Spears added, “This is the same military that made [Austin] a four-star general.”

But the Army’s new rules beg the question: “Why now, when multiple reports have debunked Austin’s claim?” Even if, Spears said, the Army’s directives were implemented with the intention of clarifying what amounts to “extremism,” a word he says is “open to wide interpretation in the current political climate,” the new policy “makes it appear that if you disagree with [the views of Austin and the Biden administration], then you’re an extremist.”

Attorney R. Davis Younts agrees with Dr. Spears, telling WND that he likewise fears the ambiguity in the Army’s new rules. According to the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and former judge advocate general (JAG) officer, the directives encompass an “extremely broad range of activities.”

Both Spears and Younts are concerned about how the new directives will be interpreted. For example, considering the 0recent Army portrayal of pro-life organizations as terrorist organizations, Younts said his concern has been heightened. “If a service member offers money or resources or volunteers to support a group that advocates against abortion, could he be viewed as supporting extremists?” Younts questioned. “What about supporting a group that advocates for … the existence of only two genders?”

Taking it one step further, Younts asked, “If I were still in the Air Force and tithed to my church, which goes out to pray in protest against a transgender story hour, would my church fit the Army’s definition of an extremist group?”

To that end, Spears pointed out that Army directive 2024-07 states extremist activity includes “advocating widespread unlawful discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity, or sexual orientation.” He warned that “because they feel they need to please their political superiors, some military commanders will infer that because you disagree with women competing in men’s sports, you are now engaging in an act of extremism.”

In fact, Spears added, the Army’s new reporting requirements “essentially force commanders to prove the innocence of soldiers accused of extremism, rather than guilt.”

“These are now things every single Christian military member that is doctrinally aligned with traditional biblical views of life, marriage and gender must consider,” Younts told WND. For this reason, he recommends “these service members should be raising the issue to their congressmen, and apply for a religious accommodation to be exempted from the policy.”

“We have to get [military] leaders to clarify what they are saying in the new directives,” Younts argues. “I don’t think it’s irrational to believe that some of today’s senior leadership would view the church or another 501(c) nonprofit organization as an extremist for disavowing abortion, same-sex marriage and a host of other sins running rampant in society.”

For Spears, one of his biggest concerns is the fact that the directives apply not only to active-duty Army personnel, but also to inactivated members of the Reserve and National Guard. “When reservists and guardsmen are activated, they fall under the Uniform Code of Military Justice – but when not activated, they fall under civil law, like all other civilians,” he explained. “The Army’s new rules on so-called ‘extremism’ further erode the line between civilian and military life.”

“This is a terrifying development that extends the Defense Department’s intrusive reach into the personal lives of non-activated Reservists and National Guardsmen,” Spears argued. And this, he concluded, “sends a chilling message across the force that must be overturned by the courts.”

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Historically, the CCP has been known to weaponize its food supply, which it has done against millions of its own citizens, resulting in mass starvation and suffering. But today, it appears the communist government is stockpiling food, indeed, making it a major national security priority for its people. Why?

Tommy Waller, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Center for Security Policy, says most Americans do not understand that “food security is national security”. And that currently, the safety of American citizens is, indeed, being jeopardized by the U.S. government. The retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, in an interview with WND, explained that “at the federal level, our nation has catastrophically failed to prioritize food security while all of our adversaries, both hostile nations and globalists, have had their crosshairs on food for quite a while.”

For example, Waller said, in stark contrast to “having no problem starving its own people,” the Chinese government has an entire agency called the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration. It is largely responsible for laws and regulations that oversee grain and material reserves of the East Asian country.

In statistics often touted by members of the Chinese regime, Waller said, “China’s grain inventories are so abundant that the stock-to-use ratio is well above the international grain security threshold.”

“The U. S. government has not put a major priority on food security or preparedness,” Waller warned. In contrast to the Chinese regime’s prioritizing strategic reserves of food, he told WND, “under the Biden administration, the USDA and FEMA have transitioned from a culture of preparedness to priorities of diversity, equity and inclusion – DEI – and climate change.”

What’s more, he said, the Biden administration has incentivized many farmers to reprioritize the use of their land away from cultivating it for food production. Through the Conservation Reserve Program, he explained, “farmers are getting paid more to get their land into the program as opposed to farming it.” While he conceded there are some benefits to the program, he also pointed out that farmers are producing less food as a result, and this diminishes America’s food security.

“Less than two percent of our population produces food for everybody else in this country,” Waller noted. “The average American isn’t prepared to go without food for any duration, so you can see the importance of keeping our farmers farming.”

“Take away farming and you take away food,” he said starkly, while warning that the average person is extremely unprepared for shortages of food. “They just take it for granted, and it’s understandable because we’ve always had it very easy in this country,” Waller said, but warning about one scenario in which Americans could find themselves hungry right away: “That number one scenario is a loss of electricity caused by widespread electric grid blackouts.”

Waller’s interest in food security, he said, steadily grew due to his work to secure America’s electric grid. “All of the infrastructure we have is dependent upon electricity,” he said. “When considering the second and third order effects of electric grid outages, you can see how food becomes a very significant item of importance.”

“Most Americans don’t think twice about paying for home insurance, automobile insurance, life insurance, but for whatever reason, they don’t think about food insurance,” Waller told WND. “They don’t think about stocking up.”

While the federal government may be failing to stress the importance of preparedness, Waller attests that food security “is the one area where individual people and their communities could actually enhance national security,” adding that the lack of preparedness is “a fixable problem, if we are smart about our policies and more.”

In a 41-page report, the Center for Security Policy has published recommendations to bolster food security at the federal, state, local and individual level. With little action at the federal level, he said, it is important for Americans to do what they can at the state and local, as well as individual levels.

For example, the Center, which has a 20-year track record of helping state governments shape policies to bolster national security, is actively supporting numerous lawmakers seeking to outlaw agricultural land from being owned by foreign adversaries. The security-oriented nonprofit also promotes the concept of community-supported agriculture and the importance of citizens purchasing their food from local farmers. “By helping sustain their work,” Waller told WND, “it’s going to create more resilience at the community level.”

“Everything the Center for Security Policy does is for the public interest,” Waller said. “We exist to provide uncompromised analysis, unflinching leadership and unconventional solutions to keep Americans safer,” he explained, adding that “there are no corporations behind what we are doing.” He shared that CSP can also “provide threat briefings at the county level for emergency managers and law enforcement”.

Ultimately, as Waller explained, “food security is national security, and everyone – from citizens to lawmakers – can do their part to increase both.”

Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@wndnewscenter.org.

Navy Commander Rob Green said that while the military vaccine mandate was officially rescinded in January, it may have caused irreparable harm and a “looming” readiness crisis, he told The Epoch Times. Cmdr. Green, who is on active service and risks retaliation for his views, emphasized that his views don’t necessarily reflect those of the Pentagon or the Department of the Navy.

In his book “Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines,” Cmdr. Green shared a number of compelling human stories from those who fought back against the military mandate and analyzed those actions in light of similar actions taken by America’s Founding Fathers.

From the very beginning, he argued that the mandate was “a blatantly unconstitutional order,” largely because service members were offered vaccines that were labeled as authorized for emergency use only, rather than having full Food and Drug Administration approval.

“The amount of coercion that took place to encourage service members to take the vaccine destroyed what little credibility our military leaders had left after the embarrassing Afghanistan withdrawal,” he said.

“There has been a deep betrayal of trust starting with the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to the Afghanistan withdrawal and now finally to the military vaccine mandate with the subsequent targeted removal of conscientious service members,” he said. “Senior military leaders are refusing to even acknowledge these mistakes, let alone attempt to correct them.”

“Service members who were kicked out or made the decision to leave [the military] because of the mandate are still reeling,” Cmdr. Green said. “But most people, including the media, have only focused on the tens of thousands [of service members] who either voluntarily or involuntarily separated.”

Meanwhile, “no one is focusing on the betrayal of trust for the hundreds of thousands of people who did not want to go along, but ended up with a shot in their arm anyway.”

“The initial push for an ineffective, unlawful vaccine followed by it being rescinded has resulted in a betrayal of trust beyond what words can describe,” Cmdr. Green said. “There is no doubt in my mind that recruitment and retention will suffer much more than it is now.

“Unless our leaders take radical actions to hold themselves and their peers accountable, the lack of trust in our military will result in a massive readiness crash,” he said. “It is a looming, unspoken mass exodus, and will likely come to fruition in the next three to five years, as those who felt betrayed come to the end of their enlistments or reach retirement eligibility.

“They’ve realized no one cares about the physical injuries caused [by the vaccine], or the harm to their individual rights,” Cmdr. Green said, referring to their right to refusal. In addition, he said that “as vaccine injuries become more prevalent, we are seeing the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] refuse to acknowledge any connection to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.”

For Cmdr. Green, “This should be no different than how we take care of service members forced to live in asbestos-infested buildings or forcibly exposed to Agent Orange.”

In a recently published op-ed on LifeSiteNews, Cmdr. Green argued that by not holding anyone accountable for those failures, military leadership can no longer be trusted.

He wrote that no one was held accountable for the 7,000 lives lost in a Global War on Terror with “no clear strategic objectives or victory criteria.” He also pointed out that no one was held accountable for the botched Afghanistan withdrawal or the 8,400 service members separated over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

In an effort to change Department of Defense policy, he said, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) recently slowed the process of flag and general officer promotions, holding up promotions of over 300 admirals and generals. Cmdr. Green’s op-ed noted the dichotomy in how senior military leaders handled this promotion hold, as compared to the Afghanistan and COVID-19 vaccine mandate failures.

“Instead of correcting these critical betrayals [GWOT, Afghanistan, and COVID-19 Mandate],” Cmdr. Green wrote in his op-ed, “the three service secretaries have engineered a media blitz focused exclusively on the highest-level brass and their next promotions.”

According to Cmdr. Green, until there is accountability at the highest levels, “a significant number of service members will no longer trust our uniformed and civilian leaders to have the moral courage to do the right thing, to follow the law, or to stand up for service members’ constitutional rights.”

He said, “There is so much money at stake that ‘We the People’ are going to have to force [military leadership] to admit their mistakes and do the right thing. If we fail to do this and fail to hold our leaders accountable, the recruiting crisis will just be the tip of the iceberg, and the resulting readiness crash will leave us weaker and more vulnerable than we have been since the War of 1812.

“Personnel gaps across all ships in the U.S. Fleet ballooned from 7,000 to more than 18,000 in just under two years, and the crisis is deepening as the Navy and the other services are continuing to miss recruiting targets by wide margins,” he said. “The readiness bubble is about to burst. We’re going to see a shortage [of service members] like we’ve never seen before.”

Loss of Individual Liberty

Apart from the recruiting decline and the precipitous drop in public trust, Cmdr. Green said there’s another contributing factor that’s going to be detrimental to military readiness and the security of the nation.

“Senior military leaders have become enemies of the Constitution,” he said. “They swore an oath to defend the Constitution against foreign and domestic threats.”

“[Because] the Constitution enshrines individual liberty as paramount,” he said, “the entire point of the Constitution is not to defend the government from the people but to defend the rights of individuals in the face of some future tyrannical government.”

He says, “That future is now, and those in the military who sought to trample individual rights have made themselves domestic enemies to the Constitution.” For this reason, he said, “These leaders must be resisted, and God willing, eventually held accountable.”

Leaders Prioritize Political Agendas

Senior military leadership remains focused on pushing political agendas and not on supporting and enabling individuals to be the best citizens they can be in defending the constitutional republic, he said. For example, he noted that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training is running rampant at places such as the Air Force Academy and is weakening the U.S. armed forces.

“These [DEI] programs are placing institutional problems on groups of people rather than judging each individual on their own words and actions,” Cmdr. Green said. “Ultimately, this is the destruction of the individual and individual rights in favor of grand political programs designed to coral groups of people into bins that make it easier for the government to control them.”

For the military specifically, “the current crop [of military leaders] want service members who are compliant and malleable. They want service members who are not willing to stand up for their own rights,” he said. “If they are successful in purging the military of patriots, the majority of those who remain [in service to the country] will likely be exactly what they want.”

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Davis Younts, a military defense attorney, shares Cmdr. Green’s concerns.

“Military service in our nation is and must always be based on an Oath to support and defend the Constitution,” he stated. “Unfortunately, much of the Department of Defense has become staffed by bureaucrats and politicians rather than leaders or true warriors.

“These bureaucrats treat their uniform as a costume to be worn in front of the cameras rather than a symbol of their commitment to stand for freedom.”

He says “The trampling of religious freedom and the decision to ignore basic fundamental and inalienable rights during the pandemic caused a crisis of trust not only among active service members but among the American public as a whole.

“This crisis will only continue to worsen unless there is a renewed commitment among military leaders to stand by their oath and place a higher value and the rule of law and integrity than their pension.”

Call for Accountability

The newly confirmed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. C.Q. Brown, recently issued his first Message to the Joint Force, in which he discussed the foundation of trust required for the profession of arms.

“Trust across the force, that we will do right by each other,” he stated. “The trust of our families, that we will care for them through trial and triumph, [and that] as Chairman, I will strive every day to strengthen these bonds.”

Bradley Miller, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who previously served as a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne Division, was relieved of his command in October 2021 for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

Like Cmdr. Green, and in contrast to Gen. Brown’s comments, Mr. Miller says he’s witnessed a betrayal of trust in senior military leadership decisions in recent years.

“Commander Rob Green has called the senior military leadership to account for their unlawful actions and they have failed to answer that call,” Mr. Miller said. “As Green has steadfastly pointed out, the Pentagon leadership has repeatedly sided against the Constitution, against the law, and against the rights of its service members.”

“Military readiness is currently in a state of freefall,” he said. “This is not in spite of the actions by DoD leaders to prevent this crash, but precisely because of the actions they have taken that have directly led to it.”

In response to an inquiry from The Epoch Times, a Pentagon official said in an email, “Our research shows that the top barriers to service are concerns about death or injury, PTSD, emotional issues, and leaving friends and family—not political issues.”

“Concerns about vaccines and ‘wokeness’ are among the least likely to be raised as reasons not to join the military.”

This article was updated to add a comment from the Pentagon.

Karolina Stancik once considered herself “very healthy,” playing multiple sports from adolescence through early adulthood. At 21 years old, she chose to serve the country by joining the U.S. Army in February 2021.

“We were told that it was going to be required and we should take it before we shipped out to basic training,” she said, which was before Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s August 2021 announcement of the military vaccine mandate.

This messaging, according to Stancik, made the new recruits feel like, “You’re a bad person if you don’t get the vaccine, and you don’t care about the people around you.”

“As a young, new soldier, I and a lot of others around me, did what we were told,” Stancik said.

“We were too new to know all the rules and possible loopholes,” she added. ” I pretty much blindly took it because I didn’t know you could get exemptions” for medical or religious reasons.

Stancik ended up taking the Moderna vaccine in March and April 2021; since then, “life has been an uphill battle,” she said.

First, came the breathing issues.

“I was dealing with what doctors considered asthma at the time without a diagnosis, and I had never had any lung issues at any other point in my life,” she said.

Stancik also experienced what felt like a cold or sinus infection, pressure in her head, and dizziness.

Next came a fever, as well as numbness and tingling throughout her body. But she was told by a doctor that these symptoms were normal.

At one point, her command threatened to accuse her of insubordination for not participating in physical training. However, “a doctor’s order kept me from getting in trouble with my command,” she said. The Epoch Times viewed that order, as well as other medical documentation and Stancik’s Army permanent medical profile to corroborate her claims.

Problems with visual processing and what she described as neurological issues began in October 2021. These included numbness, tingling, stabbing pains throughout her body, loss of motor function, tremors, and more.

“It all progressively got worse, and never stopped,” Stancik said.

In October 2021, she found herself in an emergency room, following her first heart attack. Things only escalated after that as she started experiencing nausea, a high heart rate, stabbing pains, and blacking out, she said. In February 2022, she had a second heart attack.

In addition to these two heart attacks, Stancik said she’s been diagnosed with severe asthma and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a blood circulation disorder that causes a higher heart rate when transitioning from sitting or lying down to standing up.

In November 2022, her doctor told her she had “signs of a mini-stroke,” she said. After that incident and the onset of impaired eyesight, she was finally advised to see a neurologist. She’s now waiting for the results of tests for neuropathy, dysautonomia, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and others.

Stancik’s neurological problems have continued this year.

“As I wait for results about my neurological issues, I’m also experiencing increasing problems with my visual processing,” she said.

With health issues on the rise, she said, “Half together is put together for me right now.”

Medical Care Costs on the Rise

Meanwhile, TRICARE, the military medical system, is no longer paying her medical bills because the Army has removed her from active duty.

“The bills are stacking up,” she said. “I’m getting billed for everything that follows my active-duty service.”

In February 2022, Stancik was recommended for medical retirement and is awaiting a determination.

There have been recurring costs of bloodwork analysis, doctor’s visits, and cardiology care, for example. She’s also being billed for neurology appointments.

“For cardiology, I was getting billed $225 for every single visit, so I had to stop going so often.”

Online donations help to offset some of her medical care costs.

“The experience has left me feeling pissed off, sad, and discouraged at times, but I know I’m not the only who took the vaccine and who is suffering,” she said. “My duty now, while I have the capacity to do it, is to speak out for those who need to be spoken for.

“Many soldiers were injured by the vaccine, and the Army just doesn’t care,” she said. “And because of this, I’m suppressing my anger to turn it into something positive to be a voice for them.”

Stancik says that her views don’t reflect those of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Army. Moderna and Army officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.