Timothy Soseki Kudo

@timkudo.com

363 Followers 340 Following

Writes things people sometimes read. Bylines: New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, The Atlantic, et al. Insta: https://www.instagram.com/theensoproject/ Web: timkudo.com Signal: @timkudo.01

An order by Trump to deploy the military and have it open fire on protesters would be catastrophic in a way few Americans who haven’t served in uniform realize. Unlike the National Guard at Kent State, today’s military is significantly more lethal. In 1970 the Ohio National Guard killed four protesters and wounded nine at Kent State University, firing semiautomatic M1 Garand rifles, which held an eight-round magazine and could fire 40 to 50 rounds a minute.* As one National Guard member there that day recalled: “I distinctly heard one shot fired; then all hell broke loose when 28 men fired a total of 67 shots over a period of 13 seconds.” A modern military squad operates with roughly nine M16s loaded with 30-round magazines and three squad automatic weapons that each contain 200-round belts of ammunition. If today the same number of soldiers were firing for 13 seconds, as they did at Kent State, they could easily unleash several hundred rounds. Additionally, contemporary crowd-control tactics often result in “kettling,” in which protesters are pushed into densely confined areas, where individual bullets are likely to penetrate multiple people before stopping. This has nearly happened before. When the Insurrection Act was most recently invoked, it was by President George H.W. Bush, who deployed elements from the 1st Marine Division to Los Angeles in 1992, after the Rodney King verdict. After taking fire while responding to a domestic disturbance with the city’s police department, Marines fired more than 200 rounds into a house with children inside after an officer yelled, “Cover me!” Thankfully, nobody was harmed, but as Major General James Delk, who commanded the joint task force at the time, would write: “The marines responded instantly in the precise way they had been trained, where ‘cover me’ means provide me with cover using firepower.”
Title: Counts of U.S. Protest Events: 2017 vs. 2025. Line graph. X axis: Jan 22-Feb 26. Y axis: Cumulative number of protests 0-1000-2000. Green 2017 line from 0 to just over 1000 protests. Blue 2025 line from 0 to nearly 3000 protests during the same period.
Hegseth told the officials that if Mexico didn’t deal with the collusion between the country’s government and drug cartels, the U.S. military was prepared to take unilateral action, according to people briefed on the Jan. 31 call. Mexico’s top brass who were on that call were shocked and angered, feeling he was suggesting U.S. military action inside Mexico, these people said. The Defense Department declined to comment.
That’s why we’re calling on all decent and honorable people, civilian and veteran alike, to join us in opposing this policy. But we’ll give the last word to Army 2nd Lt. Nicolas Talbott, one of the trans service members suing the government, who said it best: “Every individual must meet the same objective and rigorous qualifications in order to serve. It has been my dream and my goal to serve my country for as long as I can remember. My being transgender has no bearing on my dedication to the mission, my commitment to my unit, or my ability to perform my duties in accordance with the high standards expected of me and every service member.”
Instead of judging our military members by the character of their service, Trump’s executive orders would have us judge them by the size of their “reproductive cell.” Like similar segregationist policies of the past, the order would prevent the most qualified from even being given the chance to prove themselves, undermining a military meritocracy that should be singularly focused on winning our nation’s wars. (But perhaps segregation is the point. This week, the Army and other service branches abandoned recruitment efforts at a prestigious annual Black engineering event that, as one Army recruiter told Military.com, was “one of the most talent-dense events that we do.”) Paradoxically, Trump’s executive order states, “Military excellence cannot be diluted to accommodate political agendas”—and on this point we agree. Because what the president is in fact doing is imposing a radical gender ideology in order to appease activists unconcerned with the requirements of military service, like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion. It will only decrease military readiness and get soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and National Guard members killed.
If allowed to take effect, a ban on service would resegregate the military based on gender, deny basic health care to trans service members, and bar them from certain unisex areas, such as bathing facilities and berthing. No doubt there are service members who agree with many provisions of Trump’s order, but it doesn’t make logical sense for a military unit. That’s because a core principle of military readiness is that training should be realistic. This is why we practice with live ammunition fire and maneuver, despite the risks, and at training bases that replicate the Spartan conditions of combat deployment. In fact, Trump’s executive order makes this very point: “The Armed Forces must adhere to high mental and physical health standards to ensure our military can deploy, fight, and win, including in austere conditions and without the benefit of routine medical treatment or special provisions.” But mandating unrealistic living conditions only undermines readiness and puts service members’ lives at risk. If the military is supposed to train like it fights, why should service members face integration and shared living spaces for the first time at war?
President Donald Trump’s executive order banning trans people from serving openly in the military states: “The United States military has a clear mission: to protect the American people and our homeland as the world’s most lethal and effective fighting force. Success in this existential mission requires a singular focus on developing the requisite warrior ethos, and the pursuit of military excellence cannot be diluted to accommodate political agendas or other ideologies harmful to unit cohesion.” However, as military veterans, we know that this order will accomplish exactly the opposite. When it’s 5 degrees out and expected to drop, and it’s you and your battle buddy’s turn on night watch to share a sleeping bag in the snow-covered mudhole the two of you have spent the past 12 hours digging, the last thing on anyone’s mind is gender or sex. In those moments, all that matters is a person’s character and the mutual trust that comes from living and training together until you’re certain you have each other’s back. Excluding people who can meet rigorous service standards simply because of who they are is a fundamental attack on this principle, which has formed the bedrock of military service since the inception of the republic.
But Paul is a good example of an all-too-serious intellectual movement that has emerged from the wreckage of the Obama years, when “postracial” liberal optimism began to curdle into open contempt for liberatory struggles like Black Lives Matter or the fight for universal health care. I think of it as the far center: a loose coalition of disillusioned Democrats, principled humanists, staid centrists, anti-woke journalists, civil libertarians, wronged entertainers, skeptical academics, and toothless novelists, all brought together by their shared antipathy to what they regard as the illiberal left. The far center is for free speech and bourgeois institutions; it is against cancel culture, student protests, and radicalism of any kind. Yet it rejects the idea of a shared ideology or politics. Instead, its members see themselves as independently sane individuals — concerned citizens who wish only to defend civil society from the unbearable encroachments of politics. So the far center is liberal, in that its highest value is freedom; but it is also reactionary, in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice.
Image of newspaper clipping with headline "Let My Family's Story Be a Lesson and a Warning"
At his Senate confirmation hearing yesterday, Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth refused to state whether he would follow an unlawful order given by President-elect Donald Trump. During the nationwide protests after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Trump asked the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” It is entirely conceivable that during his second term, what was previously a question becomes an order. Everyone in the military chain of command swears an oath to the Constitution that requires them to disobey unlawful orders—and to be very clear, a mass shooting conducted by the government against its own citizens is definitely that. If the secretary of defense is unwilling to fulfill that oath in contradiction of a commander in chief who demands absolute fealty from his subordinates, it will fall on the uniformed career service members to uphold the Constitution and ensure that the military is not unleashed on American civilians.
Instead, let us now follow the example set by those who resisted. The example set by people like Yasui, Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Endo, Wayne M. Collins, “no-no boys” like my grandfather, my aunts and uncle and my father, who along with more than a hundred thousand others inside the camps engaged in the everyday act of defiance known simply as survival. They passed on their stories so that when the time came, we would know what to do to preserve the miracle that is *an America where all children are born equal in the eyes of the law. *highlighted gray to the end.
But we know from that same history that injustices like this can be resisted. And now we must*. To confront the Trump government without compromise, we must* raise what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “coalition of conscience.” Elected leaders must oppose the assault on constitutional rights they’ve sworn to uphold and defend. Mayors and governors of sanctuary cities must unite in opposition, file legal challenges, and refuse to allow local law enforcement, administrative and logistical resources from being used to carry out this immoral policy. And we must* fight state by state in every single election for every single office until we have turned back the tide of cruelty sweeping across America. * "we must" highlighted first in orange, then in yellow twice
An order by Trump to deploy the military and have it open fire on protesters would be catastrophic in a way few Americans who haven’t served in uniform realize. Unlike the National Guard at Kent State, today’s military is significantly more lethal. In 1970 the Ohio National Guard killed four protesters and wounded nine at Kent State University, firing bolt-action M1 Garand rifles, which held an eight-round magazine and could fire 40 to 50 rounds a minute. As one National Guard member there that day recalled: “I distinctly heard one shot fired; then all hell broke loose when 28 men fired a total of 67 shots over a period of 13 seconds.” A modern military squad operates with roughly nine M16s loaded with 30-round magazines and three squad automatic weapons that each contain 200-round belts of ammunition. If today the same number of soldiers were firing for 13 seconds, as they did at Kent State, they could easily unleash several hundred rounds. Additionally, contemporary crowd-control tactics often result in “kettling,” in which protesters are pushed into densely confined areas, where individual bullets are likely to penetrate multiple people before stopping.
The death of the Democratic Party’s claim to respectability looks like a dead child in Gaza, killed by a bomb supplied by our government. It looks like five more dead journalists in Gaza, assassinated by our ally with our blessing. It looks like one more bombed hospital in Gaza, the endpoint of the road away from humanity and towards barbarity. It looks like our government burying official warnings of a famine in Gaza, because it doesn’t suit our political purposes. All of these things were done by the Biden administration. All of these things were done by the Democrats. When Joe Biden thinks back on his time as president, he should see nothing but an image of a mother crying over a dead child with its limbs blown off by an American bomb.
At the end of a dark night, neither virality nor conspiracism solve the problem enough to truly make you feel better, because they don’t involve you actually doing anything. That’s not their intent; getting you to listen and click again tomorrow is. Like losing weight or beating depression or feeling better about yourself, the solution to feeling better about politics and actually resisting is so obvious it almost feels insulting and just rigorous enough to feel like there has to be a better way. You’ve just got to get up and do the work.
AGAINST THE SERVANTS OF MAMMON WE cry to thee for jus tice, O Lord, for our soul is weary with the iniquity of greed. Be hold the servants of Mammon, who defy thee and drain their fellow-men for gain ; who grind down the strength of the work ers by merciless toil and fling them aside when they are mangled and worn; who rackrent the poor and make dear thel space and air which thou hast made free;| who paralyze the hand of justice by corruptioi and blind the eyes of the people by lies;! who nullify by their craft the merciful lawsl which nobler men have devised for the! protection of the weak; who have made usj ashamed of our dear country by their defile-1 ments and have turned our holy freedom intol a hollow name; who have brought uponl thy Church the contempt of men and havejri cloaked their extortion with the Gospel ^ thy Christ. For the oppression of the poor and the sighing of the needy now do thou arise,