Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll has pulled the plug on an attempt by someone at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to hire Joe Biden's director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Jen Easterly, a retired Army colonel, a West Point graduate, and former head of CISA, was supposed to assume duties "as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the department of social sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.”
In an announcement distributed via X, Secretary Driscoll stated that Easterly's appointment was not approved and ordered a total review of how it came to be.
What makes the hiring of Easterly so unconscionable is that President Trump fired Biden's appointees to the service academies' Boards of Visitors and replaced them with handpicked members in early February, signaling that he considered those institutions both important to America's defense and perceived as being captured by the left. Plus, it isn't as if Easterly was some low-profile leftie being slipped into the USMA faculty. She was one of the named defendants in the government censorship scandal that led to the Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden). She was at ground zero when the government undertook its grotesquely misguided program of strong-arming social media companies into restricting conversations on vote fraud in the 2020 election and the COVID virus response.
Jen Easterly ran CISA and directed its multi-year, illegal censorship operation against conservative media, including me personally and @FDRLST, the news publication I run.
Why on earth is this woman being gifted a plum sinecure at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point after what she did to this country? Who approved this appointment of a woman who clearly has zero regard for the Constitution and the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of the press?
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Leftist West Point Professor Leaves in a Huff Over the End of Brainwashing – RedState
One of the interesting parts of Parnell's letter was a directive that "The United States Military Academy will immediately pause non-governmental and outside groups from selecting employees of the Academy, including instructors, professors, teachers, and shaping academic or developmental lectures." It seems that Easterly was appointed to the position by the Academic Excellence Foundation, and the slot is funded by a donation from USAA Insurance. While this is not an uncommon arrangement at colleges and universities, I think it is highly problematic for service academies to work in that way. It is even more problematic when the process selects an obvious partisan who was involved as a defendant in one of the most significant government censorship cases in the history of our Republic.
The real lesson of this fiasco is that the Defense Department is still in thrall to leftist interests and must be watched like a hawk if it is to be a reliable member of this or any administration.
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