Thread by @johnkonrad

I bear partial responsibility for the entire Naval Woke College debate. I’ve been hammering them for years.

Let me tell you why…. 🧵

Strap in, it’s a LONG story.

Go all the way back to the start of the Trump 1.0 administration.

Actually, go back further. Go back to Obama.

The Navy is NOT in charge of shipbuilding. They are in charge of ship buying.

The DOT is in charge of shipyards. Specifically @DOTMARAD. And USCG handles shipyard regulations.

Internationally, the United Nations @IMOHQ is in charge. But MARAD is the only major agency in the United States chartered to promote an American industry. So Obama had to subvert it.

Obama went out of his way to play dumb on all maritime matters. But here’s the thing: he grew up in Hawaii. It is impossible to grow up on an island and not understand shipping.

He wanted to turn the oceans into a collectivist wonderland run by Marxists.
Here is how he did it.

First, he installed the failed governor of Mississippi, Ray Mabus, as Secretary of the Navy.

Then he installed the worst USCG Commandant the nation has ever seen: Admiral Papp, who promoted Senior Executive Service officers aligned with UN globalists.

Papp’s SES pushed the UN to further adopt climate change and DEI. He landed his top USCG JAG a job leading the IMO and made sure the elected Secretary General was little more than a figurehead.

The problem: the UN has zero authority to regulate warships. So Papp had Mabus simply order the Navy to accept USCG shipbuilding rules that were, in fact, UN standards.

Then Mabus pushed hard on projects he knew would fail: LCS, Zumwalt, and a massive initiative to convert every Navy ship to run on used French fry oil.

He also forced thousands of change orders onto new aircraft carriers.

Doubling down on failed designs while welcoming UN-approved inspectors into American shipyards was a one-two punch.

Bad ships, plus crushing red tape, would cripple the most powerful Navy in the world.

But the UN one-world-government scheme requires more than weakening the strongest. You also have to elevate the weakest.

Chinese shipbuilding was growing, but their workmanship was a disgrace. They could only build simple vessels: coal bulkers and the like.

So Obama dispatched an American NGO to Chinese shipyards to teach them everything we know. Not just any NGO. The most profitable nonprofit in America.

(For legal reasons, I can’t name them.)
That NGO pulled the best naval architects, marine engineers, and inspectors out of American yards and sent them to China.

They are still there today.

But what about MARAD? It is mandated, by law, to advance American maritime interests.

He simply didn’t appoint anyone for years. He installed a junior congressional aide with a history of poor performance as acting administrator for most of his first term.

(In his second term, when Navy shipbuilding efforts started crashing and burning, Mabus put a submarine O5 in the job.)

Ships and shipyards are heavily unionized, so the AFL-CIO Marxists made sure no one complained.

And Obama figured out that the GOP hates the Jones Act so every time a based mariner or shipbuilder complained just remind them how the Republicans want to steal their jobs.

Simultaneously you get Democrat friends in the Senate to support the number one JA and Merchant Marine hater: John McCain

If anyone complains about Navy shipbuilding you point them to all the ways Dems are cooperating with McCain

McCain who was undermining the shipyards and commercial maritime base.

Now, how do you keep the Navy itself from screaming bloody murder?

First, you double down on submarines, which cannot police the oceans the way surface ships can. UN rules were kept out of Electric Boat.

Second, you push hard on joint warfare. You send your best and brightest officers not to sea, but to the desert, to serve as support elements for the Army.

You pull in reservists like @PeteButtigieg and @RepGoodlander.

1/5

You do everything you can to land book deals, podcasts, and movie roles for Navy SEALs fighting on dry land.

Dial up every Navy activity ashore. Dial down everything at sea.

The final blow: commercial fishermen were not happy. And they are a loud constituency.

Kneecapping them was easy. All Obama had to do was designate 553 million acres of ocean as National Monuments and watch the industry collapse.

You also had to divide and conquer. Alaska has the most powerful commercial fishing lobby by far, so you don’t “protect” those fisheries, and you get McCain to make their governor his running mate.

This was the easiest part of the whole operation. He styled himself a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt, and the GOP signed off without a fight.
So what does any of this have to do with War Colleges?

I was naive to most of this when Trump was elected. All I knew was that the Naval War College had become incredibly powerful in steering naval policy under Mabus.

War colleges train future admirals and generals. They plant ideas and policies in officers’ heads before those officers ever pin on Rear Admiral.

I knew they were going woke. I knew Tom Nichols was off the rails. I did not know how deep the corruption ran.

All I knew at the time was how powerful they had become.
So Trump gets elected in 2016, and we finally have a chance to reform MARAD. But the Navy admirals won’t let go.

The narrative: the Navy was locked in a zero-sum fight for shipbuilding funding against the US Merchant Marine (run by MARAD at DOT) and the USCG.

The Navy saw the US Merchant Marine as a threat, not an ally. They refused to let us run our own agency. A Navy guy had to be in charge.

But DOT Secretary Elaine Chao wanted to save shipyards. So she cut a compromise: the Navy could pick the Merchant Marine Commandant to run MARAD, but he had to be a Merchant Marine Academy grad.

Elaine was married to Mitch McConnell. The Navy couldn’t say no.

They settled on Rear Admiral Mark Buzby.

Buz came in swinging. He reorganized the Merchant Marine Reserve. He funded a fleet of new training ships. He recruited top talent to run each academy. He saved Philly Shipyard.

I did a lot of work behind the scenes to help Buz.

Buz’s next big project was to restore our maritime highways: the rivers and waterways we need to reindustrialize.

Trucks are great for an import economy. They cannot carry enough weight to rebuild steel mills, shipyards, and the rest of heavy manufacturing. You need rail. You need barges.

I launched a startup at Buzby’s request and poured my personal time and money into the problem.
Then the New York Times ran a hit piece on Elaine Chao’s ties to Chinese maritime interests.

I won’t get into the details. I’m not here to defend or trash the McConnell-Chao family.

They are a complicated bunch, and I could write a book on the great and terrible things they have done.
The point is this: the Dems all follow the New York Times. So the unions and the rest of the maritime coalition had to back away from Chao’s maritime initiative.

The article did even more damage to McConnell, who already had a rocky relationship with Trump. MAGA turned on Mitch, sparking a war still raging today, with Mitch blocking the SAVE Act and Thune retaliating by blocking the SHIPS Act.

At the same time, the so-called West Point Mafia (WPN) was taking over the Trump administration. The Army Corps of Engineers controls the marine highways, and the Army would have to pay for Buz’s plan.
Pompeo, Esper, Milley (Princeton, but loyal to the club), and the rest of the WPA wanted that money flowing to defense contractors and consultants. Not to reindustrialization that would have strengthened the Navy.

2/5

By the midterms, the Trump administration, under the WPM, was tearing itself apart and lost Congress.

Another powerful West Point graduate, Jack Reed, took McCain’s old gavel at the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The WPA didn’t just block Chao and Buz. They sold off most of the Army’s watercraft fleet at auction and turned the Army Corps of Engineers into paperwork pushers who now subcontract almost everything to whichever private firm spends the most on lobbyists.

Certain shipyards complained. They were handed more submarine contracts as a consolation prize and told to build out consulting businesses and digital products instead of ships.

The only person who put up a fight was Trump himself. He tasked his most loyal advisor, along with the NSC and NEC, to find solutions the White House could drive on its own.
O’Brien at the NSC pushed hard. He was cornered at every turn by Milley’s Joint Chiefs and SECDEF Esper.

Esper had already engineered a coup to force the Secretary of the Navy to resign, replacing him with a string of feckless acting secretaries.
The NEC and Navarro both worked hard to save shipbuilding. They had very different ideas.

Navarro was a China hawk. He wanted to unite the core maritime constituents to fight the CCP together. To do that, he had to win over the Jones Act lobby.

Kevin Hassett at NEC wanted to pull internal levers to give heavy industry a boost. In his view, that meant suspending the Jones Act.

There is more to this story, of course. Both men are patriots who tried to do the right thing. Both were aligned on saving shipyards.

But the WPM used the Jones Act to drive a wedge between Hassett and Navarro.

It didn’t ultimately work. Both men are back together in Trump 2.0. At the time, though, it made anything maritime they tried to do agonizing.

Then 2020 happened.

Retired Navy admirals wanted a Navy guy running DOT. The WPM wanted a land war veteran. The Obama crowd wanted a Marxist aligned with the UN.

They settled on a Navy Intelligence reservist: Pete Buttigieg.

Pete is politically savvy. He knew the maritime issues, especially the Jones Act, were political kryptonite.
And everyone was at each other’s throats, demanding action as shipbuilding, the Navy, the USCG, and the Merchant Marine all started collapsing in readiness.

But Obama gave him the playbook: do nothing.

Ignore MARAD.
Ignore the Navy.
Ignore the USCG.

When Congress hands you $1.1 trillion to fix infrastructure, just don’t do any maritime projects.
Let the UN take over and quietly build out a massive UN Carbon Tax that will fund UN DEI, climate programs, and Marxism for decades.

Don’t even help the White House.

When they ask for Merchant Marine ships to support the Gaza Pier, send one that’ll catch fire. When the Baltimore Bridge collapses and Biden puts you in charge, pass it off to the broken Army Corps of Engineers. When the Houthis fire on US Merchant Marine ships, don’t say a word. Not even a tweet.

But this thread isn’t about that criminal neglect by Mayor Pete.

It’s about the Naval Woke College.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

3/5

What the hell does any of this have to do with the Naval Woke College in Newport?

As I investigated everything above, the NWC and professors like Tom Nichols kept surfacing.

They were driving policy behind the scenes. They were enormously influential with Navy admirals and SES.

Because they train future admirals, they set the policy and procedures for everything the Navy does.
And they are also where admirals and secretaries turn to rationalize bad decisions.

Back to the collapse of Trump 1.0. I knew the NWC was going woke and embracing DEI like no other institution in the Navy.

Here’s the thing: I, a based Republican, supported DEI at the time. I’m from the Bronx. I thought, and still think, the Navy should do more to recruit and support minorities.

I just had no idea how thoroughly Marxists had corrupted DEI.
And it was very clear the new CNO, endorsed by Milley and Esper, was a big fan of everything the NWC was publishing.

All I knew was that NWC held a LOT of power, both directly and through setting the future agenda.

So as Trump 1.0 was collapsing, my marine highway startup was snatched away from me by RFK Jr.’s most environmentally unhinged friends: a faction of the Riverkeepers.

I was broke. I didn’t know where to turn.

Buz reached out. He said that even though most of what we worked on had fallen apart, some projects, like saving Philly Shipyard with new training ships, were holding up.

He basically said I had built up a lot of favors in DC and I should cash them in to get myself back on my feet.

I was contemplating which favor to call when MIT reached out and offered me a job. So I didn’t need the help.

But a lot of my advocacy had come from one individual: Dr. Sal Mercogliano.

I told Buz I’d like to call in that favor.
The NWC reserves one chair for a Merchant Mariner, and nobody was more qualified than Professor Sal.

He literally wrote the book on the intersection of the Navy and Merchant Marine after WW2.

MARAD got to pick the chair. Buz said if that’s what I wanted, it was a done deal.

So he sent Sal’s name to Newport, and all hell broke loose.

They blackballed Sal. Sal, a guy absolutely everyone loves. A world-respected academic. Winner of the CNO prize for Naval History.

They didn’t just block Sal. They installed in his place my chief competitor in the maritime news business. A guy who didn’t have a PhD.

I thought it was very strange. I needed to get up there and look around, so I registered for some events. Denied.

Buz, as Commandant of the US Merchant Marine, could select one professor, but he also got two student slots. I asked him to enroll me as a student.

Surely they wouldn’t deny me, a naive supporter of their DEI agenda, a lowly student slot.

They blocked me too.

WTF?

Then, with guidance from people like @cdrsalamander and @brentdsadler , my eyes began to open to the Marxism behind DEI. I started tracing the source of our problems straight back to Tom Nichols’s lap.
I started quietly publishing a little on X.

Nothing too anti-NWC. I had now fully awakened to how influential and powerful they were. How they controlled the majority of admirals.
I didn’t want to fully piss off an organization that powerful. I needed their help to fix shipbuilding.

But I was vocal about Mayor Pete abandoning my fellow Merchant Mariners in the Red Sea.

A friend of Nichols lashed out on X. I didn’t want to pick a fight, so I took it offline. I called his office phone and left a very nice message.

I even offered to drive up and meet him on base so he wouldn’t be inconvenienced.

He then posted on X that he had called NCIS.

The next year, I’m asking a question at a conference, and the SECNAV invites me on stage. NCIS rushed me and pushed me away.

I had been working with SECNAV Del Toro’s team on the SHIPS Act. They were as surprised as I was.
And I wasn’t alone. A number of journalists who reported on the NWC were under investigation.
Sal? Someone called the CIA on him.

The CIA!

4/5

Who has the power to launch an NCIS investigation without the Secretary of the Navy’s approval or permission?

The fucking Naval Woke College.
Even now, they are a problem.

I helped Secretary of the Navy Phelan considerably. My influence on battleships and fireboats is not a secret.

So I asked someone in his office to look into the NCIS investigation on me.

I knew it couldn’t be serious. The Secret Service had read my file when I went to the White House.

It was serious. Phelan immediately locked me out of all press events and pushed the person who followed up with NCIS and the NWC straight out of the office.

And right now?

I can’t say exactly, but they absolutely have their crosshairs on Sal, on me, and on many others I know.

That’s why this debate won’t go away on X.

That’s why Tom Nichols so arrogantly mocks anyone who questions the NWC.

He knows he has more power than anyone realizes.

Shipbuilding.
The SAVE Act.
The SHIPS Act.
Reindustrialization.
China.
CENTCOM.
GWOT.
USCG
Fisheries
USM
US Navy
The list goes on and on.

He has all the money he needs from speaking gigs and NGOs bulk-buying copies of his terrible books.
He has friends working inside NCIS and the CIA.

He has someone in the White House blocking key appointments, including Navy Comptroller, the official in charge of hundreds of billions in budget authority.

He posted openly about taking down Trump’s most loyal supporter, the author of the SHIPS Act, and THE most important appointment for national security: National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.

The list goes on and on.

If he can outmaneuver:
Trump.
The UN.
DOT.
NEC.
NSC.
SECDEF.
SECNAV.
SECWAR.
SASC.

Why should he worry about what @DataRepublican publishes about him on X?

He has the entire left in his pocket to swing as the hammer.

That’s why he writes for The Atlantic.

Not because it’s prestigious, but because the entire Tammany Hall Democrat political machine takes its marching orders from the liberal press.

Where does the liberal media get its marching orders? The Atlantic.
Where does The Atlantic get its marching orders? Tom Nichols and the WPM/NWC cabal.

The man is untouchable.

And the irony? We would never have found out if they had just let @mercoglianos teach sealift, or let me sit in on a few classes as a student in a back room in Newport.

That is what makes them dangerous:

Open arrogance fused with secret shadow power.

P.S. This is X, not the New York Times. Do your own research. Don’t take anything here as gospel.

Not what I write. Not what @RadioFreeTom writes. Not anything anyone posts on this platform.

The character limits here force compression, and posts like this are reconstructed from imperfect memory and personal experience.

Names, dates, sequences, and motivations should all be independently verified.

Everything above is my opinion, my recollection, and my interpretation of events I lived through or covered. Where I describe the conduct or motives of named individuals, I’m offering my honest assessment based on what I observed, not a court-tested factual record.

The goal here isn’t to hand you a verdict. It’s to give you enough skepticism, and enough threads to pull, to go investigate this yourself.

@RadioFreeTom @threadreaderapp unroll

P.S.2 this is a big reason why I support Trump and Hegseth

Shipping moves 90% of world trade and BOTH Dems and GOP don’t want shipbuilding to succeed

The blob has pulled out ALL stops across both administrations to stop Trump from building ships

I can’t even publish the worst parts.

But Trump KEEPS PUSHING to build more ships. The man does not give up.

🫡

@RadioFreeTom @threadreaderapp Lots more context and background can be found on my appearance on the Don Jr show:

rumble.com/v70otl4-corrup…