“Get woke, go broke” doesn’t apply just to businesses but also to government — and, in particular, the warning should be heeded by the military. For when it goes woke, our nation can end up broke in terms of prestige, international influence, and even prosperity and freedom. Despite this, political correctness, which has long plagued the armed forces, has been given a wokeness-inducing dose of steroids by the Biden administration.
What’s more, just as with Bud Light, the military is alienating their core “market.” The result?
The Army will miss its 2023 recruitment target by a whopping 25 percent.
The consequence of this, and the fact that our weapons stockpiles are depleted and may not be quickly replenished by our wanting manufacturing sector, means we might not be able to successfully wage a war against our main geopolitical rival, China. And what’s the Biden administration’s response?
It’s focusing on pushing the sexual devolutionary (“Pride”) agenda.
Reporting on this Wednesday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham dubbed the problem “Biden’s G.I. Joke.” And, she said, while the media are focused on their main obsession, President Trump, they’re ignoring our self-abasement and slouch toward destruction. As Ingraham put it, this obsession serves to distract from “all Biden’s disasters, like the fact that China is building a powerful spy post in Cuba, just 100 miles from Miami; … or that [we] would probably lose a war defending Taiwan against China right now because we’ve sent so much of our own weaponry and munitions to Ukraine.”
Moreover, a “‘swift response may not be possible,’” Ingraham related, quoting Politico, “‘in large part because of how shrunken the U.S. manufacturing base has become since the Cold War.’” The commentator then mentioned that figures such as Pat Buchanan, herself, and, more recently, Donald Trump have long warned of this problem.
Yet despite this sword of Damocles dangling over our heads, the White House’s response is essentially, “What, me worry?” Of course, Biden actually scoffed at the Chinese threat while campaigning in 2019, saying the burgeoning nation was “not competition” for us. In this, he was exhibiting either his infamous incompetence — which even Barack Obama warned of — or judgment corrupted by the money his clan has received from Beijing sources (or both).
Regardless, what’s clear are the Bidenites’ priorities. For example, they just held last week, as one event speaker put it, “the largest ‘Pride’ celebration the White House has ever had.” The week before, the Department of Defense sent a representative to a “Pride Employee Resource Group” event to “acknowledge the contributions of service members and department civilians in the lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer community.”
Also appearing was affirmative-action Space Force officer Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, deputy chief of space operations, who announced that she was “a cisgender woman” (i.e., “normal,” though whether this claim on her part is tenable has not been ascertained). She bemoaned what she called the “400 anti-LGBTQ+ laws [that] have been introduced at the state level” (read: laws prohibiting the mutilation of minors) and claimed that they diminish military readiness. Then there was Commander Emily Shilling, billed as a “transgender commander” and the deputy program manager at NAVAIR, who told the audience that the “open inclusion” of “combat-ready transgender volunteers enhances our readiness, promotes innovation, and fosters a culture of respect and understanding that makes the armed forces better.”
Shilling presented no evidence to buttress her(?) assertion. But if having the Army miss its recruitment goal by 25 percent constitutes improvement, then, yes, the affirmative-action hire may be correct.
Most other military branches are experiencing the same recruiting woes, too. And how are they responding? The Air Force, lighter than air, sent the following tweet:
Wow, that’ll fire up the red-blooded, Middle American man to hit the recruiting office! As one respondent under the tweet put it, “China’s laughing. Russia is too. Our enemies see us as a joke.”
And if that wasn’t quite enough to evoke guffaws, here was the Space Force’s version of exploring strange new worlds:
Whom does the Space Force hope to recruit with this image? Six-year-olds? As for “Becoming Light,” do they mean Becoming Bud Light?
This isn’t the entirety of the military’s value signaling, either. At the aforementioned Pride event, Pentagon representatives said things such as, “LGBTQ+ and other diverse communities are under attack just because they’re different — hate for hate’s sake. We must be prepared to confront any such challenge directly.”
This prompted Ingraham to ask “why our Pentagon is spending so much time inventing imaginary enemies when we have real ones” (because the imaginary ones don’t shoot back?).
In reality, of course, it’s not the sexual devolutionaries being canceled and persecuted, but those opposing them.
As to how all this affects recruiting, historian Victor Davis Hanson appeared on Ingraham’s show to provide perspective. Saying the military was becoming paranoid and attacking “the messenger” instead of addressing “the message” because it’s losing Americans’ support, he outlined how the Pentagon is alienating those who’d normally enlist.
The South has 31 percent of our population, Hanson pointed out, but historically provides 40 to 45 percent of military servicemen, and 45 percent of enlistees identify as conservative. Moreover, upwards of 70 percent of those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan were white males — more than double their overall population share. Yet the military insists on pushing anti-white, left-wing propaganda in the ranks. It’s essentially saying, “You infernal white males are oppressors, responsible for all the world’s ills, and need to check your privilege.”
“But, hey, keep on enlisting — because we need you to bleed and die in faraway lands to defend the freedom to go woke.” My, who could resist an appeal like that?
This is, again though, just an exacerbation of a long-standing problem. Approximately, 20 years ago, I met an athletic, intelligent, 20-something white man who’d recently left the military. Why?
Because white males were being passed over for promotions in favor of affirmative-action candidates, he informed.
As for the wokeness overall, the good news is that pandering to a small percentage of the population, one that doesn’t join the military any more than it drinks cheap beer, will surely work out for the Pentagon just as well as it has for Bud Light.
For those interested, Ingraham’s segment is below. The portion with Hanson is found here.
