Chelsea Manning

"The most violent people in prison, time and time again, were the prison staff. Always. There was never an exception, right? [...] When you have the state, you know, to back you up, and you have state immunity, and you have authority over another person, like, almost absolute authority over another person, and youve stripped the other persons credibility away, then you can just do whatever you want. And the things that they do are just cruel. You know, sure, not every prison guard is cruel, but every single one of them looks the other way at the ones who are and backs up the ones who are."

"I dont cooperate with grand juries or the police ever. Thats just my standard policy."

"Its not like theres anything wrong with the lockdowns, right, and I wanna be clear about that. Thats come up before, its like, no, the lockdowns were necessary for public health reasons, cause we had a mass casualty event hit the United States and we needed to try to keep people safe. But the impact of being locked down for a significant chunk of time is going to produce an added layer of that trauma. And we just kind of have to take care of ourselves and be gentle with ourselves."

"This is the thing about the right, is that they just wanna win. If theres anything Ive learned from being around people on the far-right my entire life, it is that they just wanna own libs. They just want their enemies to lose. And if that means killing themselves in the process, then yeah, lets go!"

"It turns out that being on the left and having actual principles isnt very profitable."

"In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror."

"Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission."

"The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. Weve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact weve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life."

"Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy -- the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps -- to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light."

"I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability."

"The episode of Chelsea Manning and the Harvard Institute of Politics fellowship is instructive. You may recall that Bradley Manning, as he was known back when serving as a low-level United States Army intelligence analyst, chose to violate his oath and betray his country. He downloaded an astonishing quantity of classified information about the American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and sent it all to WikiLeaks. Manning was tried, convicted, and imprisoned for nearly seven years. Deservedly so. From a reputational standpoint, that probably should have been the end of it. But it was not: the prisoner Bradley Manning became Chelsea Manning, a transgender woman, and the societal forces that endorse and celebrate victimhood transformed a wartime traitor into a persecuted hero. When Chelsea Manning emerged from prison in May 2017, the perceptual transformation was complete."

"This was the background to the announcement on September 13, 2017, when Chelsea Manning received a visiting fellowship at the Harvard Institute of Politics. A prestigious institution was taking on board a controversial progressive celebrity- despite the fact that Manning had no experience in the very thing that the Institute of Politics specialized in: politics. Manning didnt even know much about national security, considering her time in the Army was brief and low-level. There was no evidence whatsoever that Mannings qualifications met the standard for such a position. What exactly were students expected to learn from her? How to betray their country? But Chelsea Manning was a persecuted "whistleblower" turned LBGTQ activist- and so Chelsea Manning was receiving elite institutional approval. It was victimhood worship manifested into reality at one of our countrys most preeminent institutions."