There was a time, in the early 2000s, when Arti Walker-Peddakotla saw roughly 40 dead bodies per day. Walker-Peddakotla, whose pronouns are she/they, enlisted in the US Army because they needed money for college. During the years after 9/11, they performed autopsies on soldiers killed in combat.
The task gave them a painful firsthand look at the cost of war — a war they quickly realized made no moral or logical sense. It was difficult to see how the situation could get worse, but Walker-Peddakotla believes it did.
Two decades later, with the Trump administration fresh from bombing Iran, Walker-Peddakotla sees shades of the same arguments behind the invasion of Iraq. There’s a connection between this “imperialism,” as she puts it, and the “extremism and dehumanization” at the heart of the military.
“Part of extremism is dehumanizing people, and right now, we’re dehumanizing people in Iran just as we’re dehumanizing people at home,” she says. “When the people making decisions about where to deploy our troops are buying into that dehumanizing way of thinking, you have a very serious problem.”
Interviews with half a dozen extremism experts and veterans like Walker-Peddakotla shed light on how President Donald Trump’s second administration has ushered in new security threats that affect both the general public and military personnel. For instance, the administration recently pulled funding for the Terrorism and Targeted Violence database at the University of Maryland, a project that provided detailed information on domestic terror threats. The Pentagon cut funding for similar work and, around the same time, they abruptly ended a review of how the military identifies and counters extremist activity within its own ranks.
Dr. Amy Cooter, an experienced researcher, says these cuts could shift commonly acknowledged definitions of extremism. “There is a big disincentive that some of my colleagues in the field are very aware of in terms of what they feel able to study and talk about without some sort of backlash and reprisal,” she says. “So I think, realistically, what extremism is may very well evolve. It often does. But regardless of that, our actual ability to follow it, to analyze it, to understand it and to prevent it is in serious danger.”
The Pentagon’s decision to stop evaluating the military’s counter-extremism work arrived weeks after Brandon Russell, a former National Guardsman, was convicted of plotting to destroy the Baltimore power grid.
Russell was a neo-Nazi and the founder of the Atomwaffen Division extremist outfit. Russell’s group included members like Vasillios Pistolis, who was on active duty with the Marines when he attended the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. After the rally, Pistolis bragged online that he’d “cracked 3 skulls open” and assaulted a trans woman.
When the people making decisions about where to deploy our troops are buying into that dehumanizing way of thinking, you have a very serious problem.
Roughly two years later, a Military Times survey found that 36% of active-duty personnel had witnessed signs of white supremacy and racism within the military — a 14% increase from the prior year. And though some recent research suggests that veterans are no more likely than the average American to support extremist groups, those who do join such groups pose a heightened threat due to their specialized training.
Veterans also lend these groups legitimacy, as noted by Dr. Cooter in a recent study examining how military personnel come to be exploited by extremists. For the study, Cooter interviewed 42 veterans and discovered how an “us-versus-them framework” defined life on and off base. Prejudice cuts both ways, Cooter found.
Some veterans argued the “us-versus-them” mindset was necessary for a unit’s cohesion, and they suggested that “dehumanization” was necessary to enable violence in Muslim-majority countries. At the same time, Cooter’s study shows how racism within the military has harmed soldiers’ effectiveness since as far back as Vietnam. She says cuts Trump and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth have implemented could compound that problem, putting more service members’ lives at risk — or at least, those who choose to enlist.
“I’ve talked to a lot of veterans who were frustrated by the collective shoulder-shrugging in response to the Signal catastrophe, and I don’t know what that’s going to mean for recruitment,” Cooter says. “I suspect that some of the best of the best will have second thoughts.”
She adds: “I also suspect that, given some of the publicity around Hegseth and his tattoos, folks who are underrepresented in a variety of other ways may continue to second-guess their decision to join the military, given what they probably rightfully believe to be a hostile environment.”
Meanwhile, many veterans are taking the fight against extremism into their own hands.
On a hot, early June day in Washington, DC, Iraq War veteran Kris Goldsmith was one of the 5,000 people attending the “Unite for Veterans, Unite for America” rally. He also helped organize it.
Goldsmith founded Task Force Butler to investigate and counteract extremist groups, with a special focus on the groups that recruit veterans. In 2022, while Task Force Butler was advocating for the arrest and prosecution of the Patriot Front members who assaulted a Black man named Charles Murrell, members of the white nationalist group delivered a death threat to Goldsmith’s mother’s home.
When he’s not countering extremists, Goldsmith also focuses on how the Trump administration is impacting the VA, where 80,000 jobs are under threat. That was the focus of the June 6 protest.
“We’re starting a movement that is helping Americans to understand that when you do something like unite around veterans and veterans’ issues, we are actually uniting around all of America’s issues,” he says. “We are going to take the momentum from this rally, which is really about keeping America’s promises to veterans.”
Like the other veterans interviewed for this story, Goldsmith is dismayed by the way Trump and Hegseth are using the military. He spoke to Inkstick before the US bombed Iran, and after the June 21 strikes, his words took on an even graver meaning.
“Without those stories about things like torture and indiscriminate killing and all of these things that came out of Iraq and Afghanistan, ISIS would not have had fertile grounds to grow in,” he said. “We are reentering a phase where ISIS-like entities are being seeded, fertilized and watered. And this is not just throughout the Middle East and through what we think of as warfare, but it is through all of the victims of what Trump and Stephen Miller and Hegseth consider warfare, which includes immigration.”
Chris Purdy, another Iraq War veteran, shares many of Goldsmith’s concerns.
Purdy, founder of The Chamberlain Network, was also in DC for the “Unite for Veterans, Unite for America” rally, and in the days after the event, he spoke to Inkstick about the dangers of the VA cuts. There was plenty else on his mind, though, including the recent deployment of Marines and National Guardsmen to protests in Los Angeles.
“When Trump started sending our troops to the border, that was the first step in militarizing daily life,” he says. “When my organization brought this up, people told us, ‘Oh, it’s not a big deal. They’re doing minor tasks.’ But it wasn’t about the tasks that they’re doing. It’s about their presence and the fact that now people are conditioned to think that the military is an appropriate response for civil law.”
This “militarization” — coupled with the waning focus on extremism — is a dangerous cocktail, he warns.
“Anytime you’re cutting extremism work, you’re risking political violence now and in the future,” Purdy says. “At The Chamberlain Network, we see ourselves as democracy protection advocates, and when you have extensive political violence, democracy can’t function.”
The Chamberlain Network and Goldsmith’s Task Force Butler are just two of the many veteran-led organizations combating extremism in its various forms and venues. Another is About Face, a staunch anti-war advocacy group.
Rebecca Roberts, an organizer with the group, was arrested in DC on Friday, June 13, following an About Face press conference. “We were demanding money for people, not parades,” Roberts says, decrying the same cuts that worry Goldsmith and Purdy.
After the press conference, Roberts and several dozen veterans peacefully occupied the Capitol steps. Capitol Police ultimately broke up their sit-in, and Roberts says one threw her head first over a bike rack. “We were there, chanting ‘Benefits, not bullshit,’ when they came and arrested us,” she says. “Now I have a court date.”
When she talks about the incident, her voice is somber, almost resigned. It’s a stark contrast to the impassioned tone she uses when discussing her military experience. “I was a woman in the infantry, in a combat role historically open only to men. It’s a violent culture, so extremism has always been an issue.”
The key difference between previous administrations and the current Trump administration, Roberts adds, is that “the veneer is off.” She adds, “Morale is low and service members are facing a crisis of conscience, and I think it’s only going to continue to get worse.”
Arti Walker-Peddakotla, who serves on About Face’s board, said something similar, though their tone was, in some ways, hopeful.
There are veterans and service members with extremist views; they’d never argue that. But Walker-Peddakotla has met and heard from many members of the military community who find this administration’s actions at home and abroad troubling.
“The GI Rights hotline is available to any service member who needs to talk to somebody about the rights to refuse and the right to protest,” they say. “There’s a reason we took an oath to the Constitution, and not any one person.”
