Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change. Don’t Win.
Why Former USAF Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak’s
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Memories Don’t Apply To Today’s Military, Or To Today’s America, And Will Make Us Lose Every Battle, Foreign And Domestic.
This week saw more momentum toward repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Senator Joe Lieberman introduced his “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal bill in the Senate. Congressman Patrick Murphy, author of the House’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal bill, headlined HRC’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Citizen’s Lobby Day. But in a New York Times Op-Ed, Merrill A. McPeak, the 74 year-old former Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, who retired more than fifteen years ago, urged America to, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change.”
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change.” What an exquisite epitaph, that should be engraved on the tombstone of the conservative movement.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change.” It’s the very language and practice that embodies and explains America’s financial crisis, America’s housing bubble, America’s health care crisis, America’s eduction crisis, America’s infrastructure crisis, America’s misguided “War on Drugs,” America’s misguided “War on Terror,” America’s diminished world reputation, and, well, most everything else that’s wrong with America today. Not to mention, most everything that was wrong with the America of yesterday.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change” explains why the insurance and financial industries have been able to rule Congress without sufficient regulation.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change” explains why this country has a secret child homelessness problem, yet allows the bigoted policies of some states to deny same-sex couples the right to adopt.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change” explains when the NRA is quietly one of the most powerful and richest lobbyists in America, why school shootings have more than doubled over just the past few years, and why 32 Americans — eight of them children — die every day from gun violence.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change” explains why people like California’s vehemently anti-gay state senator Roy Ashburn, who represents a stridently conservative district, ultimately had to go down in flames, pulled over and arrested for DUI after leaving a gay bar,
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change.” Frankly, it’s what head-in-the-sand ostriches and head-in-the-air, too-stupid-to-stop-drinking turkeys do. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change” means we don’t move forward, we don’t solve problems, and we don’t win. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change” means we all lose.
Keeping quiet about issues that need improvement is not only bad for America, it’s downright un-American. Imagine if the Founding Fathers told folks, “Oh, that whole taxation without representation thing? We’ve decided on a policy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change.'” America would still be an English colony.
Now, all that said, let’s look into what else McPeak is offering.
McPeak retired from the military in 1994, just one year after “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was adopted. So, any experience with that law he may have had in his distinguished career would be minimal.
“I was one of the service chiefs when the “don’t ask, don’t tell†compromise was reached in 1993. Until then, every person coming into the military was asked questions directed at establishing sexual orientation, and admitted homosexuals were automatically rejected.”
(Ah, the “good ole days,” right, McPeak?)
Second, McPeak is 74. He comes from a different time, a different world. Americans, and the soldiers of today, are far more comfortable with gay men and lesbians than the soldiers of his day, which ended in 1994.
Remember 1994? The Menendez brothers had their first trial, Apple sold its first “PowerPC,” Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered, Kurt Cobain committed suicide, and George W. Bush was first elected Governor of Texas. In 1994, a man named Marc Andreessen, founded a company called “Netscape,” which introduced its first version of something called a “web browser,” named the “Netscape Navigator.” And in 1994, Marc Andreessen spoke at the “first conference devoted entirely to the subject of the commercial potential of the World Wide Web.”
That was 1994, McPeak’s last year in the military. My, things sure have changed, haven’t they?
McPeak’s argues are that the military is not about civil rights. “Why should exclusion of gay people rise to the status of a civil-rights issue?,” he asks. He says the money we expend on training “people who were eventually removed on account of homosexuality [is] minuscule.” And finally, and most importantly to him: the military is not about the individual, but the team.
“[I]t would be a serious mistake to imagine that personal performance is what matters in combat. Combat is not a contest between individuals, like poker or tennis; it is a team event whose success depends on group cooperation and morale. So the behavior that concerns us is not individual achievement but the social dynamics of relationships and groups. The issue is whether and how the presence of openly declared homosexuals in the ranks affects the solidarity of the unit.”
Let’s repeat that.
“[T]he behavior that concerns us is not individual achievement but the social dynamics of relationships and groups.”
This is McPeak’s main argument, that “homosexuals,” (as he writes clinically and disparagingly,) adversely affect “unit cohesion.” That argument is not just plain false. It is outdated.
Taking McPeak himself to task, along with The Times, Media Matters says it best:
“[N]umerous studies have considered and debunked the unit cohesion myth and the Times itself has reported on a prominent study that found that allowing gays to serve openly “does not undermine unit cohesion, recruitment, retention, morale, or overall combat effectiveness.”
As they did last month, as well:
Award-winning Joint Force Quarterly essay: Unit cohesion argument “not supported by any scientific studies.” In an essay published in the fourth quarter 2009 issue of Joint Force Quarterly — which is “published for the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University” — Col. Om Prakash wrote of “don’t ask, don’t tell”: “[T]he stated premise of the law — to protect unit cohesion and combat effectiveness — is not supported by any scientific studies.” The essay won the 2009 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay Competition.
Face it, McPeak, the “team” doesn’t have the problem you feel they do with “openly declared homosexuals in the ranks.” Perhaps you do, but today’s soldiers do not.
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The Steady State, a network of nearly 350 former U.S. Intelligence Community officials, says its members have applied the tools of their professions to determine that the United States is headed toward authoritarian rule. Calling its overall findings “sobering,” the group points to President Donald Trump’s executive branch overreach as the “primary” cause, and warns that, without organized resistance, that rule could become permanent.
In the executive summary of their newly-published, 29-page report, “Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline,” The Steady State “concludes—with moderate to high confidence—that the cumulative effect of multiple reinforcing dynamics is placing the nation on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism,” which they define as “a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”
They warn of five trends, including “Executive overreach,” which is “being consolidated through governance by decree and weaponization of the state.”
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Also, “Erosion of judicial independence” that has “advanced not only through partisan appointments, but through strategic reliance on the Supreme Court’s ‘shadow docket;'” “Legislative weakness and abdication” that have “diminished Congress’s capacity to serve as a coequal branch;” and a re-shaping of the electoral system.
Finally, they add that “the undermining of public trust, knowledge, and civil society through attacks on the press, academia, watchdog institutions, and dissenting voices has weakened democratic culture and civic resilience.”
In a scathing rebuke, they write that “the primary driver of the U.S.’s increasing authoritarianism is the increased frequency of Executive Branch overreach. President Donald J. Trump has leveraged emergency powers, executive orders, federalized military forces, and bureaucratic politicization to consolidate control and weaken checks and balances.”
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Without “organized resistance by institutions, civil society, and the public,” the group warns, “the United States is likely to continue along a path of accelerating democratic erosion, risking further consolidation of executive dominance and a loss of credibility as a model of democracy abroad.”
The Steady State says its members include former officers of the CIA, NSA, DIA, State Department, and other national-security agencies.
They said they wrote the report “because the same tools we once used to assess foreign risks now show unmistakable warning signs at home.”
In a video announcing their report, the group’s executive director Steven Cash said that “America is facing an existential threat of growing autocracy here in the United States.”
Tomorrow, we release the Steady State’s assessment of American democracy—written by former national security officials using the same tools once used to evaluate authoritarian regimes abroad. Their conclusion is clear: the threat is real. America is facing an existential threat… https://t.co/84gwLlbrqL pic.twitter.com/VKfXmoVAX6
— TheSteadyState (@steadystate2025) October 15, 2025
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Image via Reuters
House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is the latest to lash out at Karoline Leavitt over the White House press secretary’s Thursday attack on the Democratic Party, during which she alleged it is “catering” to “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” Leavitt’s widely-denounced remarks came as Republicans on Capitol Hill repeatedly targeted the nationwide “No Kings” Day protests set for Saturday as “Hate America” rallies.
“The Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals,” Leavitt said on Fox News on Thursday afternoon. “That is who the Democrat Party is catering to — not the Trump administration, and not the White House, and not the Republican Party, who is standing up for law abiding Americans, not just across the country, but around the world.”
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Jeffries blasted Leavitt, but first took aim at a variety of Republicans over controversial issues and what he described as “racist” and “antisemitic” remarks.
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“We’ve already seen a rise in political violence and hatred in America,” the Democratic leader began. “And then you’ve got swastikas apparently appearing in the offices of Republican members of Congress.”
“You’ve got Young Republicans engaging in the most antisemitic and racist speech possible,” he continued, referring to a Politico report that drew condemnation of the group’s members.
“Like, this is apparently who many of these people are,” he said.
“They are ripping the sheets off, in plain view of the American people. Their words, their actions, revealing themselves in so many different ways.”
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“And then you got Karoline Leavitt, who’s sick,” he charged. “She’s out of control. And I’m not sure whether she’s just demented, ignorant, a stone-cold liar, or all of the above.”
“But the notion that an official White House spokesperson would say that the Democratic Party consists of terrorists, violent criminals, and undocumented immigrants — this makes no sense.”
“That this is what the American people are getting from the Trump administration, in the middle of a shutdown,” he observed. “So their actions continue to speak for themselves, which is why they’re on the wrong side of public sentiment.”
Jeffries: “You’ve got Karoline Leavitt, who’s sick, she’s out of control. And I’m not sure if she’s just demented, ignorant, a stone cold liar, or all of the above. But the notion that an official WH spokesperson would say that the Democratic Party consists of ‘terrorists,… pic.twitter.com/RXqBFlsujY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 17, 2025
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President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, ICE, is reportedly rapidly amassing surveillance technology — including iris scanners, facial recognition software, and drones — which could be used to track not only undocumented immigrants, but also to target members of “Antifa,” which the president has sought to label a “domestic terrorist organization.”
According to a report by The Washington Post, ICE also has technology to monitor individuals’ cellphone activity and location data, physical movements, social media posts — and even software that can hack cellphones remotely.
Some of the tools ICE has acquired include “cellphone location software that can enable the tracking of a phone’s movements without a court warrant.” The Post added that “federal contracts show ICE has been expanding its fleet of small, remote-controlled drones, which it has said it is using to film protesters.”
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“Trump and other administration officials have used the term ‘antifa’ broadly to refer to protesters outside of ICE detention centers,” the Post noted, adding that “documents show that some of the technology may also be used to target what the administration regards as anti-ICE extremist groups.”
In his September executive order, President Trump alleged, “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law. It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals.”
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as “both former FBI Director Chris Wray and the Congressional Research Service have explained, antifa is not a group or an organization, but a decentralized movement.”
ICE’s acting director Todd M. Lyons recently vowed to use special agents and criminal investigators “to track the money” and “to track these ringleaders.”
The Post added that “Democratic lawmakers, civil rights watchdogs and former officials have expressed concern that ICE now has a green light not only to monitor immigrant communities, but also to carry out broad surveillance of Americans exercising their First Amendment right to oppose government action.”
“I’m extremely concerned about how ICE will use spyware, facial recognition and other technology to further trample on the rights of Americans and anyone who Donald Trump labels as an enemy,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) in a statement to The Post.
READ MORE: ‘Deliberate Incitement’: Outrage as White House Claims Dems Cater to ‘Hamas Terrorists’
Image via Reuters
‘Existential Threat’: U.S. on Path to Authoritarianism Warn Ex-Intelligence Officials
‘Sick’: Jeffries Torches Trump’s ‘Out of Control’ Press Secretary
Trump’s ICE Expands Spy Arsenal and Eyes ‘Antifa’: Report
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