Gary Clark's lazy, bigoted lies about the military and America dishonor his former uniform, part 1

Lakeland's self-appointed military/veterans czar recently attacked service members and veterans at a Memorial Day presentation to a civic club at a church fellowship hall. It was a disgrace.

Gary Clark, Lakeland’s self-appointed veterans and military affairs czar, thinks the U.S. Military — and America — sucks now. We dirty Americans stole the election from Trump and now everything has gone to hell.

“I have very little regard for for the intel community. I have very little regard or admiration for the Department of Justice now. And I have very little regard for what’s happening at the Department of Defense. But I am old, and I’ve seen a lot,” he told my Kiwanis Club a few weeks ago, during our Memorial Day presentation, when he was supposed to be honoring fallen service members, not acting out a Truth Social post.

We agree on the “old” part, at least.

You can watch Clark’s presentation here. I was in Australia at the time; so I did not see it live.

In that same presentation, Clark explicitly blamed a recent, tragically fatal Blackhawk helicopter crash on too many people who are not white, straight men serving in the military. Really, he did. He referred to Diversity Equity and Inclusion as “DIE,” a clever inversion of the usual DEI acronym. He said it’s the reason the Blackhawk crash happened because the military doesn’t care about readiness anymore, just diversity.

I’m going to destroy that open, lazy bigotry with data in just a second. And the fact that I can do so easily, with some very basic research, casts doubt for me on the quality of Clark’s service as a career admin and personnel officer in the Air Force. I hope he was not this sloppy and dishonest and bigoted when we wore the uniform — not to mention overseeing Lakeland’s city pension fund in his second career.

What Gary Clark despises

First, I want to introduce you to Lakeland’s own Rudy Destin — pianist, district champion high school wrester, U.S. Marine, and generally decent young man, who has become a part of our family.

Here he is, in the circle, with the flag in front, leading his training cohort onto the parade ground at Parris Island during Marine Corps basic training graduation. Rudy has since completed Marine Combat Training and is proceeding to train/study for his specific assignment.

I took this picture about a week before Gary Clark polluted the civic space of my Kiwanis Club to “honor” Memorial Day by slandering Rudy and so many other human objects of Clark’s bigotry.

Gary would’ve hated the make-up of Rudy’s graduating class, its drill instructors, and its crowd of supporters, which embodied American diversity in every way.

Each of those fine Americans have sworn an oath to defend Clark and the U.S. Constitution with their lives — no matter what racist, misogynistic, false bullshit he enjoys spewing in public.

Clark’s most lazy, ignorant, and vicious lie

The chart below shows the rate of active duty accident death in the U.S. Military dating to 1980, when 1,556 service members lost their lives via accident. By 2021, number of accidental death suffered by the woke, “DIE,” active duty military suffered had dropped to 310.

Now, to be fair, today’s active duty military is smaller than 1980’s. So let’s look at rate of accidental death per 100,000 service members. It was 76 service members per 100,000 in 1980. Today, it is 23, which is less a third of the 1980 fatal accident rate. Here is my source, the “Defense Casualty Analysis System,” an official military publication, which is easy to google and put into a spreadsheet and chart, as I have.

Gary Clark could have easily created this chart and made it part of the blinkered Power Point he brought to Kiwanis. But it doesn’t fit the narrative he wants to sell. Indeed, I suspect he’s never bothered to actually research any of this. Bigotry is always a symptom of laziness.

Instead, Clark wanted to share this with his audience:

At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, at 101st Airborne, two Blackhawks collided [in March] and nine people, nine soldiers, died. At Sun ‘n Fun [Lakeland aviation festival], there were also two Blackhawks I went out to visit with the crew the next day just to express my sympathy. A warrant officer tells me: “It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. We’ve got people who are being brought in now to meet the requirements to meet the numbers that have no business being anywhere close to an airplane.”

He says: “I’m getting out as soon as I can. The only emphasis that’s being placed on us right now isn’t readiness, not combat readiness, its DIE-ing, diversity inclusion, and equity. Those are the things that are being emphasized.”

First of all, here are the names of the soldiers who died in the Fort Campbell crash. Gary Clark came to Kiwanis on Memorial Day to use those soldiers, not name them or honor them. So I will name and honor them:

• Warrant Officer 1 Jeffery Barnes, 33, of Milton, Fla.;

• Cpl. Emilie Marie Eve Bolanos, 23, of Austin, Texas;

• Chief Warrant Officer 2 Zachary Esparza, 36, of Jackson, Mo;

• Sgt. Isaac J. Gayo, 27, of Los Angeles, Calif.;

• Staff Sgt. Joshua C. Gore, 25, of Morehead City, N.C.;

• Warrant Officer 1 Aaron Healy, 32, of Cape Coral, Fla.;

• Staff Sgt. Taylor Mitchell, 30, of Mountain Brook, Ala.;

• Chief Warrant Officer 2 Rusten Smith, 32, of Rolla, Mo.;

• and Sgt. David Solinas Jr, 23, of Oradell, N.J.

Here is actual background on the crash.

These soldiers gave their lives training for difficult and dangerous night helicopter operations. (You may recall that elite Seal Team Six and the Delta Force special operators had major problems with helicopters and airborne operations in the successful Bin Laden raid and the failed effort to rescue American hostages in Iran, the latter of which happened during Gary Clark’s time in the military.)

These brave Americans, who gave their last full measure of devotion, had no utility as human beings or soldiers for Clark beyond the political and social slander he wanted to weaponize. And you can probably guess, just by their names, which of those nine patriots he would blame for their own deaths — and which he wouldn’t.

If that warrant officer exists, he and Clark should worry about suicide, not fake woke accidents

I would not put it past Gary Clark to invent a warrant officer that he could inject his own words into. But I also don’t doubt that sentiment exists among some in the military. It’s a giant institution that reflects the country as a whole.

Lots of people in America, indifferent to any actual evidence, treasure their prejudices far more than their country or their military or their family or their god or any sense of truth.

MAGA depends on that fact for its existence.

If Clark’s warrant officer exists — and if he leaves because too many women, minorities, and gays have helped drastically reduce accidental military deaths since Clark’s heyday — we’re all probably better off without him. Even so, as a citizen, I acknowledge and appreciate his service.

None of that changes the actual data. Take a look at this chart.

Accidental death was the leading cause of active duty military death every year from 1980 to 2003. Even during the peak Afghanistan and Iraq War/Occupation years of 2001 to 2012 (note the dark blue spike), deaths from hostile action exceeded accidental death only five times.

Accidental deaths have come down so much since Clark’s heyday that active duty suicide has overtaken them as the leading cause of active duty death. It happened for the first time in 2016 and strikes me as probably the greatest immediate problem facing the military.

I suspect that suicide rate reflects a deeper and more systemic issue: the country expects the military, despite the enormous resources we commit to it, to do too many things all at once without taking seriously what it takes to sustain those demands and behavioral expectations on human beings and equipment and skill development. It is a very similar problem to that faced by teachers and police forces.

Military life is demanding and tough on relationships, even in a bad job market. Today, the Joe Biden private sector job market that competes for recruits is better for non college-bound and/or working people than any in recent memory.

Ashli Babbitt was a traitorous Capitol Lynch Mob criminal, not some J6/MAGA martyr

Clark barely touched on force demands and recruiting challenges at all.

And when he did, it was mostly just to provide an excuse to talk about his J6/MAGA amalgamation of grievances. This is an actual slide from his presentation, populated by various derangements that both caused and/or emerged from January 6th.

It’s a greatest hits record of Tucker Carlson’s and Alex Jones’ dumbest, most cynical and hateful shows. It demonstrates how deep in the bowels of Capitol Lynch Mob-ism Clark actually is. You should listen to him talk about it. It’s way worse than even the slide.

I could go down this list one-by-one, pointing out his specific lies, like I did for the “Blackhawk - DIE” bullet — but that would take up too much space.

So just consider each talking point through the lens of Clark’s lazy ignorance of the actual accidental death numbers.

And understand Gary Clark considers it a bad thing for the military and the country that a Capitol policeman helped save Congresspeople and representative democracy from the Capitol Lynch Mob on Jan. 6 with skillfully applied violence against Ashli Babbitt.

I’ve written two articles that went into great depth about Lt. Michael Byrd’s brave heroism in beating back the most dangerous part of the Capitol Lynch Mob with a single skillfully fired bullet that killed Ashli Babbitt. See here and here.

Lt. Byrd, a black man, has not been celebrated and honored for his bravery and skill by people like Gary Clark — likely for the exact same reason Clark blames diversity for the death of Fort Campbell soldiers he didn’t bother to name.

Why Gary Clark is “pissed”

Clark wrapped up his ridiculous Q-Anon slide with this: “So I could go on and on but I won’t. You can tell I’m a little pissed.”

Remember, he said all this during a Memorial Day presentation to a civic club inside a church fellowship hall. So understand this: if you’ve invited him your club or event to talk about supporting veterans, you’re getting that bigoted J6 stuff instead.

There is no veteran or military obligation or honor Clark cares half as much about as owning the libs and trashing service members or veterans with the wrong political, sexual, racial, or social makeup.

And the real reason Gary Clark is pissed, I suspect, is far simpler than the elaborate web of fake conspiracies on his “Why?” slide.

Gary Clark is pissed that the U.S. Military honored its constitutionally apolitical role in American society and refused to seize voting equipment and keep Donald Trump in power. He’s pissed that U.S. Military leaders took their oaths seriously. He’s pissed that the U.S. Military won’t use its power — at least not yet — to make the country a dictatorship of criminals and/or cranks like Gary Clark.

He’s pissed that he doesn’t own the U.S. Military or America. Gary Clark hates American representative self-government if it extends to everyone equally. And he hates the idea of a military that honors and protects that.

Just listen to him. Don’t take my word for it.

He’s also pissed that the woke American military, without even firing a missile or putting a boot on the ground, has helped brave Ukrainians protect their country and smash the tough, manly mythology of Vladimir Putin, global anti-woke-ism’s heretofore greatest hero. Again, the actual human beings fighting and dying and experiencing the torture and rape of an undisciplined invading army of would-be colonizers are irrelevant to Clark.

In fact, many Gary Clarks have done much rooting for Russia to overrun Ukraine so they can call America — their own country — and its allies woke and weak. That’s what they really want from this terrible war, a bad outcome they can blame on Joe Biden and their imagined domestic enemies. The fact that the opposite has happened drives them crazy — and turns them into peaceniks.

Russia’s anti-woke failures have even made Gary Clark acknowledge that the hippies and John Kerry were right about Vietnam so he can weaponize that fact against continued American support for Ukraine’s defense against Russian colonial brutality. He talked about that in his presentation, too.

We’ll discuss that odd trick, which demonstrates Clark’s political and social loyalty to MAGA above America and common decency, in Part 2.

No more ceding sacred civic space to this charlatan

Gary Clark appointed himself czar of veterans and military in Lakeland some years ago. He’s made himself the guy reporters always call for some veterans or military quote.

Like many people in this town, I have quietly rolled my eyes at that — and his behavior — for a long time. But I never engaged him at all until Fall of 2021. I’m not personally a veteran; and it just wasn’t a fight I wanted to take on. You’d be surprised how much I’ve let go over the years out of a sense of community comity.

For as long as I can remember, Clark has been the face of the local Veterans Day parade in Lakeland, which was always badly organized and mostly poorly attended — because he’s incompetent as an organizer.

In recent years, the parade’s attendance grew as the Saturday Downtown Lakeland Farmer’s Market crowds grew. [Full disclosure: my wife oversees the market as part of her role as executive director of the Lakeland Downtown Development Authority.] It was a nice synergy.

Prior to the 2021 parade, Marine-to-be Rudy Destin and I handed out small American flags to the people lining up along the downtown streets to watch. This occasion was particularly meaningful to me because my Dad, who was a combat wounded Vietnam veteran, had died a couple of months before. His last presidential vote, in 2020, was for Joe Biden — a mortal sin that Trumps his service and sacrifice for people like Gary Clark.

Indeed, Gary Clark returned the goodwill and enthusiasm of a Marine-to-be and proud son of a wounded vet on that parade day by letting some jackass ride in the parade with a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag. (That was big at the time.)

I wrote about that in the article below. And there’s my Dad.

I sent a note to Clark, as well as that article. And he did the most cowardly thing imaginable. He just ignored it. That was Strike 1.

Clark’s attack on the commitment of my shared son and the shared civic space of my Kiwanis Club was the Strike 2. There won’t be a third.

The fact that a vicious, intellectually and morally lazy J6/MAGA-head is the self-appointed voice of veterans and the military in this community is now a civic problem I’m openly engaged in addressing.

Failure to engage would dishonor the sacrifices of my Dad and the commitment of my shared son. That’s not going to happen.

Gary Clark told my Kiwanis Club that the military “is deteriorating from the inside out.” Gary Clark says that’s because of people like my Dad and Rudy and all the things he hates about America and Americans who aren’t exactly what he thinks he is.

And as I’ve shown you with his blatant diversity/accident lies — and his J6 support — you should believe nothing Gary Clark says. He’s a straight up liar, without an ounce of integrity, rooting for a dictatorship of Gary Clarks in America. His behavior shows it clearly.

Now, it is absolutely true the American military has enormous responsibilities and challenges, like the very complex and challenging country it serves. It faces constantly competing priorities. It must be attended to, examined, taken seriously by all citizens, supported, and questioned when necessary. It’s the most powerful and expensive institution in the history of humanity. All Americans have a duty and role in managing that power in moral and ethical ways — civilian and service member alike.

But it is not “deteriorating from the inside out” — Gary Clark is.

And from now on, I will not knowingly let his rot infect our public spaces and military discourse in this community without an answer. And I invite Gary Clark to account for his lies right here in this space. I’ll publish anything he wants to say; and then I’ll rebut it.

I suspect he will take the cowardly way out like he did before; but maybe he’ll remember the sense of honor and courage that is supposed to come from wearing that uniform.

Until I hear from you, Gary, take a good look:

This is America. And as much as you hate it; it is strong and dedicated and brave — and will protect you and your lying nonsense as surely as it protects every other American.