Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, January-March 2025

Book review: They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms.

— Isidro Ortiz, PhD

Written by acclaimed investigative journalist Mike Hixenbaugh, this book is worth an earnest read because of its focus, timeliness and documentation. It will be of interest to a diverse audience, especially those concerned with public schools and their roles and impact on youth development in society, and how elements of the Right have managed to achieve political power.

COMD, Project YANO and other organizations engaged in counter-recruitment and anti-militarism work have long recognized public schools as sites of ideological and political contestation. Fueled by this understanding, they have struggled to influence policies and practices like the involuntary placement of students in JROTC. Regrettably, as this book makes clear, they have not been the only ones to recognize the role of schools in shaping the country’s political climate.

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From Draft NOtices, January-March 2025

— Lauren Reyna Morales

Americans are subjected to patriotic propaganda in nearly every facet of our institutionalized culture. From the movies, to pledging allegiance, to the nightly “news,” to the classroom and everywhere in between, we are conditioned to buy into the greatest-democracy-on-earth schtick. It is no wonder there’s an abundance of stunningly ignorant beliefs about U.S. militarism and imperialism. Beliefs that forsake a global perspective, ecological health and human rights in favor of dogmatic fealty to the beloved State narrative.

In an August 2024 publication in The Hill, columnist Amrik Chattha expressed a view so distressing that it even surprised me. Chattha wants the U.S. military to rebrand itself as a super-awesome-leading-fighter against the climate crisis. He contends that since young people are motivated to wage war against the onslaught of climate catastrophe, such a rebranding would encourage a new generation to consider careers in militarism. Chattha supposes that the U.S. military has a greater capacity to combat environmental challenges than any other organizational entity.

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From Draft NOtices, October-December 2024

— Isidro Ortiz, PhD

The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 marked the twilight of liberalism and the ascendancy of conservatism, according to some historians. In the wake of Nixon’s rise to power, the American Right mobilized and caused significant changes to social, economic and political life. Two recent works explore how the Right became such an influential force and are worth our reading.

In her new book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern American, historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd draws extensively on interviews and archival sources to chronicle the emergence and growth of organized resistance to the campus-based New Left and Black Power movements of the late 1960s. She illuminates how conservative student activists were funded by wealthy donors and received intellectual guidance from sophisticated prominent conservatives. Under such sponsorship and direction, conservative student activists such as Karl Rove, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions and Pat Buchanan crafted a robust response to progressivism on college campuses and became conservative icons.

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Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS

When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:

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