In 2021, Matthew Lohmeier, a lieutenant colonel in the Space Force and former Air Force fighter pilot, self-published Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military. The book, and Lohmeier’s decision to promote it on conservative talk shows, blindsided his superiors. A Space Force general general quickly, and predictably, fired the lieutenant colonel “due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead.”
Now, Lohmeier is set to have far more power than he ever had in uniform. President Donald Trump has picked him to be the Under Secretary of the Air Force, the military branch’s second-highest civilian position.
Like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who has obsessed over alleged wokeness in the military—Lohmeier’s greatest asset in today’s Republican party is not his service record but his belief that the military is being stabbed in the back by leftist infiltrators. In the eyes of MAGA, he is qualified for a senior military post precisely because he was previously pushed out of it. (Lohmeier did not respond to a request for comment.)
After leaving the Space Force—where he commanded a squadron responsible for detecting ballistic missile launches—Lohmeier was embraced by right-wing politicians. In particular, his cause was taken up by former Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Trump’s now abandoned pick for Attorney General, and Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), who is now the president’s National Security Advisor. Lohmeier made the rounds on right-wing podcasts and started one of his own, where he devoted the first three episodes to a painstaking reconstruction of why he was relieved of command before leaving the military. (In the first episode, he reads the entire complaint he sent to the Air Force Inspector General that he wrote before publishing his book.)
Lohmeier has not proven to be a natural in today’s world of right-wing trolling. On X, where he has posted only a few dozen times, he has fewer than 150 followers. On his podcast, he speaks at the plodding pace of an audiobook reader and gives off the earnestness of the former Mormon missionary he is.
Lohmeier—who served as an executive vice president of STARRS, a group of veterans “standing against CRT/Woke ideology in the military,” does not read as someone eager for a fight—but his decision to risk his career by publishing Irresistible Revolution is less surprising in light of his personal history of rebellion. In 2017, he explained in a four-part series for the talk show “Mormon Stories” that he converted to the Church of Latter-day Saints as a teenager. As an adult, his views diverged as he read more about the so-called Snufferites led by Denver Snuffer, a now-excommunicated Mormon. Around 2015, Lohmeier was excommunicated, too, after church leaders charged him with apostasy for teaching scripture that challenged their authority.
Following his excommunication, Lohmeier continued serving in the Air Force and later became part of the newly formed Space Force. It was his experience in the military in the wake of George Floyd’s murder—when fellow soldiers took up what he saw as a radical racial agenda—that led him to self-publish.
The book he ended up writing is not a good one. But it is useful for understanding both Lohmeier and the wider milieu he swims in—a group of Republicans who think that Marxism has begun a “destructive conquest” of the US military.
Lohmeier’s argument boils down to this logical chain: Critical race theory, which emphasizes system forms of racism, is an intellectual descendant of Marxism; some of the “Diversity and Inclusion” workshops and related material that he says soldiers were exposed to fit with a CRT agenda; therefore, the military and other parts of American society are being taken over by Marxism without many people even realizing it. As he puts in the book’s introduction, “Becoming aware of the Marxist conquest of American society, one will never again look at things in the same way. ”
To support his case, Lohmeier includes an anecdote about seeing a car on his base parking lot with a decal on the rear window that he says read “#BLM…SO BACK THE FUCK OFF.” He then writes of a chaplain at the base who wanted to share a “Race in America” workshop after Floyd was killed. The workshop would have included a discussion of systemic racism. These are galling examples presented of the military being corrupted by Marxism.
Another disturbing sign of extremism for Lohmeier is a policy proposal written during the summer of 2020 by West Point graduates—including multiple valedictorians and a Rhodes Scholar—designed to promote anti-racism at the military academy. (Lohmeier calls it a “manifesto” before labeling the authors, who were no longer cadets but fellow military officers, “merely parrots reciting the same talking points as other ideologically possessed, hand-me-down Marxists”
The details he omits are telling. Lohmeier does not include that the group of people hoping to fix racism at West Point detailed multiple instances of Black cadets at West Point being called the n-word. Nor does he mention that one of the authors, Simone Askew—the first Black woman to be named First Captain, the highest role for a West Point cadet—writes that soon after receiving that honor someone put a picture under her door that had a monkey’s face photoshopped over her own.
Lohmeier, instead, reserves his outrage for the treatment of Chase Standage, a former midshipman at the Naval Academy who faced potential expulsion after his disturbing and violent social media posts came to light. In one tweet, Standage who is white, wrote that Breonna Taylor received “justice” on the day she was killed by police in 2020. In other posts, he suggested delivering “Law and Order from 25,000 ft,” or blowing up fellow Americans with Hellfire missiles. (Standage, who reached a settlement after suing the Naval Academy, was eventually allowed to graduate and report to flight school.)
Lohmeier admits that Standage’s tweets were bad. But in a rare bit of empathy, he argues that the midshipman was caught up in the “social media frenzy” of the moment. Moreover, Lohmeier explains in a form of right-wing therapy speak that Standage was triggered: “The emotional connection Standage experiences in police-related dialogue is the result of his parents’ line of work—both are career Los Angeles Police Department officers.”
The author’s ability to spot Marxism and extremism is called further into question when he criticizes a fellow servicemember for praising a speech delivered by Michael Santiago Render, the rapper better known as Killer Mike, during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
The speech begins with Killer Mike noting he is the son of an Atlanta police officer and the cousin of someone on the force. The prelude is part of an unmistakable theme running through the eight-minute speech: An argument that racism should be dismantled through peaceful political action—no matter how great the temptation to turn to violence. Render obviously did not mean for his t-shirt, which read “Kill Your Masters,” to be taken literally.
“It is time to beat up prosecutors you don’t like at the voting booth,” Render, the rapper, stressed. He added, “What I can tell you is that if you sit in your homes tonight instead of burning your home to the ground, you will have time to properly plot, plan, strategize and organize and mobilize in an effective way.” Two of the best ways to do that, he explained, were to register for the Census and to exercise one’s “political bully power” in service of “beating up” politicians at the ballot box.
Lohmeier quotes from that section of the speech in his book. But the repeated calls to express outrage at the polls were not necessarily peaceful in the mind of Lohmeier. Instead, the rhetoric could “understandably be interpreted as an incitement to violence,” the potential top Air Force official wrote. He adds ominously that Killer Mike’s call to strategize and organize is repeated several times.
Careful planning, peaceful protest, and voting. If these are the signs of creeping Marxism, then one can see how Lohmeier mistakenly came to believe America’s military was overrun by radicals.