And really, how are you gonna wage this debate against a man who lost his son during the war in Afghanistan? It’s not a particularly fair fight, and Kelly almost certainly knows this. The whole point of the U.S. military, in theory, is to protect civilians on the mainland because the freedom and safety they enjoy is precious and something to celebrate. But Kelly, in criticizing anyone who dares speak ill of the president, decided to use both his service and his loss as a cudgel instead. Rather than celebrating the freedom of civilian leaders to critique authority, Kelly seems downright resentful of it. Keep in mind that the Trump administration is actively trying to privatize the VA and fuck over veterans while this is all happening. You can apparently support the troops now without actually supporting them, and doing so makes you more infallible than the troops themselves.

It does the military no favors to free them from any level of scrutiny, because the military has some serious problems that need to be addressed. The venerated SEAL Team Six has committed actual, honest-to-God war crimes. Sexual assault in the military rose to a record high last year. There are accounts of institutionalized racism and white supremacists in nearly every branch of the military. There is rot not only in the leadership, but in the ranks. But rather than do the hard work of making these entities better, Trump and John Kelly would rather foster resentment among the charges instead. That resentment is spreading, and at a time when we can least afford it. You’ve seen ICE officers attempt to keep sitting Democratic senators from seeing their detention facilities. That’s because those officers believe they don’t have to be accountable to those senators, nor to the American public itself.

And with Trump spreading hate every fucking day on TV, it’s not gonna get any better. Because when you create a culture where the troops—and other agencies that are unofficially deputized as such—can essentially do no wrong, you’re giving them carte blanche to do as they please, even when a majority of the public is vehemently against it. The point of having civilian politicians running the military and branches of law enforcement is so that those people have to answer to civilians, rather than ordering them around with their big guns. But what if we just voluntarily gave that oversight away out of patriotic correctness? Well, here’s an example of what happens when we do: This is what ICE officers allegedly told Gladys Monroy-Guerra de Tesucum, who was seeking asylum in the U.S. after fleeing her home country of Guatemala:

“When I first spoke with ICE officers, they told us, ‘Why did you come from your country?’, ‘Don’t you know that we hate you people?’, ‘We don’t want you in our country.’”

That’s not Trump himself being outright hateful to a desperate woman. Those are our boots on the ground. Some of these men are complicit. Some of them are downright shitty people. I’m sure there are ICE agents out there who mean well, or perhaps won’t speak up because they’re scared to death of losing their jobs. But “Don’t you know that we hate you people?” Hunting down law-abiding immigrants and uprooting them from their families? This is the work of people who clearly enjoy their barbaric handiwork. That’s rot, and it needs to be called out, especially when the clandestine goal of ICE—whose budget, by the way, Trump would like to increase by a hearty $1 billion—is not to keep you safe, but to funnel tax money to private prison ghouls and make them richer than they already are. These people, leaders and officers alike, need to be held accountable in a court of law, and not just to occasional throngs of protesters.

Because soon it’s gonna be too late. These agencies will only grow more entrenched, isolated, and hateful. And we will have enabled them to do so. Wait till Trump’s power is legitimately threatened and he steers this metaphorical battleship into anyone else who dares challenge his authority. That’s going to happen, because we have glorified the troops and ordained them as holy defenders against every last kind of international bogeyman, and it’s going to cost us everything. You are being constantly disgraced and ripped off by this administration, but who’s gonna defend you from it now? John Kelly? The police? ICE? ICE is supposedly serving this country right now by tearing families apart at the behest of the corrupt, and leaving scores of women and children broken, helpless, and alone. That deserves no support. That deserves no salute. In fact, there’s a word for the kind of people who would voluntarily cause such misery: animals.