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You didn't set out to have a platform. In 2015 your own About page said it plainly: "This blog represents only my personal views. I do not plan on using this space as a platform." (From the Green Notebook, 2015) By 2020 the same page read: "I created this site to provide a platform for leaders…" (From the Green Notebook, 2020) The exact word you disavowed at the founding became the mission. "About Me" became "About the Team." That's the whole arc in two lines, and you wrote both of them.
You've narrated what happened, too. On one of your podcasts: "I've gotten softer… because of my identity as an army officer I've adopted some of the things that our organization does… I'm the problem now." You said the thing out loud that @infantrydort is attempting to reform, and filed it under maturity.
Here's why the side you're on never feels like a side. You didn't build that reach alone. The Chief of Staff of the Army sat on your show and said junior officers no longer have to "sneak into Joe's office" to talk about writing. A Department of the Army senior enlisted leader thanked you, on your own podcast, "for helping the Army tell its story… super helpful." You announced that the site had "joined forces with the Harding Project, the Chief of Staff of the Army's initiative," and added: "The Chief is listening."
Your reach, your access, your standing… a great deal of it was issued by the institutions you’re lecturing @infantrydort on not criticising. That's not an accusation; it's the plainest reading of your own record. And when all of your capital comes from one place, defending that place feels like character, maturity, whatever.
Watch what you do with criticism, then. When a service secretary raised the problem of bad leaders, you turned it inward: "you have zero control over the leaders who are in charge of you but the aspect that you do have agency is the example that you seek out." A structural complaint about the institution comes back out as a lesson in personal development. The institution is never the thing that has to change; you are.
That is the tell in your post, too. Read what you actually flag as the danger. Not the institutions… the criticism of it. Hostility to the press. Partisanship. Taking sides. In your frame the transgression is always the questioning, never the thing being questioned. You've made deference to the institution sound like neutrality, and its critics sound like the ones with the character problem.
So this isn't really a call for restraint, Joe, it’s your immune response to the institutions who give you your living. When people press on the institution that made you, you write a homily explaining why they're the problem: too hostile, too partisan, too willing to take a side. You are taking a side. You always have. You just can't see the institution as a side, because it issued your platform, credentials your standing, and thanks you on tape for telling its story.
You're not the honest broker above the fray. You're the establishment's lapdog, and you’re too blind to see how far away from reform capability that you are. So instead, you attack those of us who are trying to bring about genuine reform.
Parent Post:
Joe Byerly @jbyerly81 - Active-duty military leaders should resist the temptation to treat the press as an adversary.
Yes, individual reporters and outlets can be unfair. They may approach a story with assumptions, pursue a particular angle, or ask questions designed to provoke. Military leaders should correct inaccurate reporting and challenge false premises when necessary.
But disagreement with the press is different from antagonism toward it.
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