The former U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel removed from the military after his video condemning President Joe Biden’s calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan went viral, has announced he might run for elected office in 2024.
“I’ll probably jump into a race in ’24,” former Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Wednesday. He said he presently lacks “the physical, mental, spiritual endurance right now to jump into a race.”
When Solomon pressed Scheller about the possibility of running for an elected office in the 2024 election cycles, Scheller replied, “I’m sure I will. … I can’t go fishing.”
Since being separated from the armed forces, Scheller has recruited approximately 25 candidates for office as part of a coalition called Vote4Vets.org. The endorsed candidates — 90% of whom he estimates are veterans — promise to press for greater accountability of military leaders, and for themselves once in office.
“So what I plan on doing is supporting this coalition that I built — and it’s still growing,” Scheller said.
“I am a conservative, but I think we need leaders and not politicians,” he told Solomon of Just The News. While Scheller said he has “a lot of respect for the office of the president,” he believes “Biden has a lot of problems.” The worst is that “he’s not, in my opinion, very good” as a president or commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces.
“The truth is it was always apolitical for me,” he said. “I never mentioned Biden’s name once … because I had a lot of respect for the office of the president.”
He likened his situation to another media-feeding frenzy that took place at the same time: “Almost like Kyle Rittenhouse … the situation becomes very politicized,” he said.
Scheller, who has criticized former President Donald Trump, said Wednesday that America faces “a dangerous time” and needs to “stabilize” itself from the onslaughts of both “the extreme Right” and “the extreme Left.”
“I just fundamentally, philosophically disagree with these people,” he said.
America must rejuvenate its military power “otherwise we’re going to continue to slide into degradation of our national power and our foreign diplomacy abilities, and we will allow somebody else to dictate the terms out there in the global arena.”
Scheller, a 17-year veteran of the Marine Corps, captured the national imagination when he demanded politicians take responsibility for the failure of America’s endless foreign entanglements.
“If I’m willing to risk my current battalion commander seat, my retirement, my family stability, to say some of the things that I want to say, I think it gives me some moral high ground to demand the same honesty, integrity, accountability from my senior leaders,” he said in his viral video. “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down, and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability, are saying, ‘We messed this up.’”
“Without that, we just keep repeating the same mistakes,” he said.
Even CNN said Biden’s bungling of the withdrawal, which left thousands of American citizens stranded behind enemy lines, was “worse than Saigon” in 1975.
Scheller told Solomon this week that the video’s resonance took him by surprise. “When I posted it, I had no idea that it would take off in the manner that it did,” he said. But he said he feared “only 200 people” seeing it and still being fired for voicing his views. “As it played out, it reached a lot of people.”
He reiterated that the fault for the military’s 20-year quagmire in Afghanistan lay with its elected, political leaders, not the men in uniform. He said, “The military at the tactical level is very effective. Where we are failing in wars is at the operational level and the strategic level — that’s, the general officer to the political realm,” which “consistently is failing.”
After posting his video, Scheller was thrown in the brig, and slapped with six charges:
- Article 88 (Contempt toward officials)
- Article 89 (Disrespect toward superior commissioned officers)
- Article 90 (Willfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer)
- Article 92 (Dereliction in the performance of duties)
- Article 92 (Failure to obey order or regulation)
- Article 133: (Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman)
He entered a guilty plea to all charges in October and received a general discharge in December.
“His crime was speaking truth to power, and power couldn’t handle it,” Stu Scheller Sr. told Fox News host Tucker Carlson last September.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.