Yes! These are picture of a West Point cadet who has repeatedly and publicly expressed his hatred of  the Army and his country, was guilty of numerous misdemeanors, treated his superior officers with rude contempt – yet was allowed to go on wearing the uniform he despised, to graduate as a soldier in the US Army and become a commissioned officer.

The Daily Caller reports:

The Army officer who outed himself as a radical Marxist had been reported back in 2015 for publishing inappropriate and outright anti-American views online, according to a scathing report obtained by The Daily Caller.

So what? The Army didn’t care.

The report gave details on 2nd Lt. Spenser Rapone’s insubordination at the U.S. Military Academy and out-of-regulations online activity. Rapone graduated almost two years later in 2016.

Then – “Rapone made the news last week for his pro-communism tweets during the #VetsForKaepernick social media craze.”

Oh, gosh! The scandal was out! Only then did the Army swing into action.

West Point’s Public Affairs office quickly released a statement last week condemning Rapone’s actions, saying that they “in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S.  Army … Second Lieutenant Rapone’s chain of command is aware of his actions and is looking into the matter”.

They are going to “look into the matter” which came to their attention in 2015.

The statement leaves readers with the idea that Rapone’s chain of command (and indeed the academy at large) was unaware of his radicalism and frequent Uniform Code of Military Justice violations. [But] it turns out a senior officer reported Rapone to his chain of command nearly two years ago.

In a social media post that concerned retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Heffington, an Academy history professor at the time, Rapone wrote, “F*ck this country and its false freedom.”

In November 2015, after being removed from his Ranger battalion for violating standards, Rapone was a cadet in his final year at the academy. According to the report obtained by TheDC, after the latest in a series of incidents involving Rapone’s penchant for insubordination, Heffington became aware of Rapone’s radical leftist activity on social media and notified the cadet’s chain of command.

“From his various online rantings and posts, it appears that DCT Rapone is an avowed Marxist, which is completely out of line with the values of this nation and its Army,” Heffington said in a sworn statement. “Moreover, CDT Rapone’s posts indicate that he hates West Point, the U.S. Army, and indeed this country. One post dated 16 November 2015 states, ‘F*ck this country and its false freedom.’ He also … even implicitly justifies the actions of ISIS and blames the United States for terrorist attacks.”

Heffington concluded in his report, “I cannot reconcile the image of a first class cadet at West Point with the things he has posted online for the world to see. To me, these are red flags that cannot be ignored, and I fail to see how this individual can possibly graduate and become a commissioned officer in six months.”

The same day he wrote this report, Heffington contacted then-cadet Rapone’s training, advising, and counseling officer. The officer was disgusted, but not shocked, Heffington said.

“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” the officer said, according to Heffington.

This reaction is merely one of many indications that Rapone’s activism, radical views and immature opposition to authority were well known around the academy — and especially obvious to his chain of command. According to a former head of the Military History and International History divisions at the U.S. Military Academy, Rapone’s plebe year history professor also reported him to the chain of command.

Heffington characterized Rapone as routinely “going out of his way to flout authority”. 

In one incident described in the report, the lieutenant colonel confronted Rapone when he heard yelling in a professor’s office. The cadet reportedly answered in a “loud and extremely disrespectful tone,” “Sir, you don’t have the right to use my honor against me!”

Rapone — a supposedly brilliant cadet, according to his mentor, Professor Rasheed Hosein of the History Department — responded with a childish tantrum: “Sir, this isn’t fair! You’re just putting me on blast!”

One has to wonder what Professor Rasheed Hosein taught Spenser Rapone.

Heffington notes in his report that he told Rapone he did not understand what “putting someone on blast” meant, a rare comedic moment in an otherwise infuriating account. Rapone’s response, that he felt “singled out” is puzzling when one considers the lengths to which the cadet went in order to cast himself as a righteous nonconformist.

In fact, Rapone had singled himself out during his confrontation with Heffington, being in civilian clothes in an academic building (a violation of regulations), by refusing to stand when a superior officer entered the room (a breach of military protocol), and by refusing to answer a superior officer’s direct question regarding who had been yelling (refusal to obey a lawful order).

Most incredibly, Rapone had the gall to respond with righteous indignation.

“He seemed to look at me with nothing but contempt and hatred, no matter what I said or how I tried to reason with him to show him how wrong he was,” Heffington said in his 2015 report.

Multiple other sources contend that Rapone willfully put his anti-capitalist, anti-military and anti-American views on display for the world to see, both in person and over social media. Two recent academy graduates, when reached for comment, suggested that Rapone’s reputation at the academy preceded him. Although they did not personally know Rapone, they stated that they were aware of his radical leftist views and his rebellious reputation long before his activism hit the news this September.

On social media, Rapone’s account (including his Instagram, with the handle “punkproletarian”) abound with praise of communist leaders, interspersed with scathing criticism of his nation, its military and even his chain of command.

Rapone’s rantings unequivocally condemn what he refers to as the military’s “brutally hierarchical rank structure,” and he deems Defense Secretary Mattis “the most vile f*ck in the current administration”. 

This 2015 report unambiguously states that Rapone’s vehement anti-American views and his obsessive insubordination made him a dangerous liability to this nation’s military. Its author urged his chain of command not to allow then-cadet Rapone to commission as an officer. And, according to Heffington, every officer he spoke to agreed with this conclusion.

So why wasn’t he kicked out of West Point?

The conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter comments at Townhall:

It gives me no pleasure to have to wonder whether the Army I served in both in active and reserve status for close to 28 years is broken. And it’s not just the Army.  The Marines and the Special Ops community, well, they seem to be holding on to the standards the rest have forgotten, but the Navy and the Air Force – they’re broken too. Our military – in terms of strategy, equipment, and leadership, is in crisis. American troops will die if we don’t fix it.

Hell, they already have.

We have a Navy that can’t even sail its few remaining ships without running into giant cargo vessels. …

It is, in fact, a disgrace. Our sailors, the precious young men and women we commissioned officers are charged with leading and protecting, are dying because our officer corps tolerates incompetence. One collision is an accident. Two is a lifestyle.

And yeah, they’ve fired some admirals, and that’s a good start, but the problem is a cultural rot, not just one ‘ed-up command. The Navy focused on things besides its mission – “to maintain, train and equip combat-ready Naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas” – and in the last few months that misplaced focus has killed 17 sailors and taken two major vessels out of action in the Western Pacific at the very moment we are on the edge of war.

Did you know several senior Navy officers are being or have been charged for corruption? Corruption. Graft. Bribes. Hookers. Senior leaders, and they’re scumbugs – criminal scumbags. But hey, the Army has its problems too. General Petraeus…sheesh, what a punch in the gut it was to see him use the Army values as a latrine. Then there was the 82^nd Airborne general court martialed for using his billet to build himself a sex harem. And how about the colonel who played games with contracts and ditched his wife to marry an Iraqi chick – the Army was so upset he got a reprimand and to keep his pension. No jail time.

Let me say that again. No jail time. Yeah, that would totally have happened to a sergeant who did the same thing, according to several high-ranking unicorns in the Judge Advocate Office.

Want to know what generals and admirals don’t get in trouble for? Failing to win wars.

The military senior leadership has turned into a fraternity, where they cover up for each other and make sure everyone graduates with a gentleman’s “C”. And it’s not even a fun fraternity – the senior leadership is painfully politically correct, parroting all the right buzzwords and received wisdom of our failed ruling caste. Many of these people are courageous on the battlefield – they’ll happily charge a Taliban warrior wielding an AK-47. But they quake in their boots back home in the face of an enemy they don’t understand and that can destroy their careers – the Social Justice Warrior.

That’s why you don’t see them saying what every damn one of them knows is true – that women, despite their heart and commitment, are a net liability in ground combat units, that trans troops are an expensive distraction and damaging to morale, and that the insane focus on “diversity” programs sucks up priceless training time and fuels, rather than quells, discord in the ranks.

But they don’t dare object. That’d be risky. And these are the senior leaders who we will allow to lead our sons and daughters in battle if Korea goes hot. How’s your confidence level?

And we have now reached the pinnacle of the military’s moral bankruptcy with the revelation that one Second Lieutenant Spenser Rapone is a communist. Not like a wannabe communist, not like a routine college-years liberal dummy, but a full-on, dictatorship-of-the-proletariat communist.

While at West Point.

Yeah, and the Academy knew. The chain of command knew what this guy was, because he told them (Army alumni have done the job the MSM, which probably sympathizes with this idiot, has failed to do, digging up plenty about him and putting it out on social media). But the Academy let this creep slide through anyway.

They let a guy who unequivocally stated his hatred for this country get a security clearance. … Then they gave Rapone a commission as a United States Army officer.

And they did it knowing who he was, because in the leftist-loving environment Obama created, they were terrified to throw the bum out on his Marx.

Hell, he felt comfortable enough to post this all on social media, and the Army chain of command didn’t act until we outside the military made a stink and it had to do something.

You’ve seen the photo of this disgrace wearing a Che t-shirt under his uniform and showing it off. Question: Who took the photo? He was with other cadets so some other cadet saw it and did nothing – doesn’t West Point have an honor code, or is honor now a microaggression? Imagine how interested CNN and the Democrats would suddenly be if his undergarment icon was Hitler, or even Robert E. Lee, instead of the racist, gay-murdering dorm room darling of the campus commies.

“But, he has a right to express his…”

No, he doesn’t.

A United States officer cannot be a communist, or a Nazi, or a jihadist. These vile allegiances are incompatible with military service, and we are under no moral obligation to enter into a suicide pact by letting these vermin into our officer corps. Haven’t enough people died, like at Fort Hood, because the chain of command was too cowardly to risk getting called jihadiphobic to get rid of an insider threat?

Apparently not. …

But the real story isn’t this one loser. It’s not even the other losers who knew what he was and said and did nothing. It’s the chain of command.

We need to know exactly what the faculty and staff at West Point knew about Comrade Cadet Rapone’s treachery. If they did know – and I bet we will find out that he was counseled in writing about it – every officer from his first line supervisor to the USMA Superintendent must be relieved and reprimanded. West Point is supposed to be the heart of the Army, but we may find that, after the pernicious influence of Obama and his ilk, it won’t even take its own side in a fight.

This is a symptom of a bigger disease. The Army, and the military in general, has lost its way.

Fortunately, we [now] have a president who actually loves America …

So will the US military switch its allegiance back to the United States?