EN LUCHA CONTRA EL PROPIO PUEBLO
¿Por qué pelear por un orden social que considera que el problema de los EEEUU son los ciudadanos respetuosos de la ley, que van a la iglesia y que son carapálidas de derecha?
Autor: Rod Dreher
Nota original: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trust-in-military-collapsing-wokeness/
Traducción: Hyspasia
Nota de la traductora: Varios de nosotros siempre creímos (o en algún momento de nuestras vidas nos dimos cuenta) que las élites internacionales (Pentágono, CIA, Departamento de Estado, gobierno GB/Francia/whatever) nos trataban como enemigos. Un tanto paranoico. Hoy vemos que el propio pueblo norteamericano se va dando cuenta de a poco - o de un porrazo, como se mire - que su propia élite lo ve como su enemigo. Están complicados.
La Guerra Cultural: Un Poder Militar en Guerra con los Norteamericanos
Por Rod Dreher
¿Por qué pelear por un orden social que considera que el problema de los EEEUU son los ciudadanos respetuosos de la ley, que van a la iglesia y que son carapálidas de derecha?
Ahora otros se están dando cuenta que una fuerza militar woke [superprogre] que está en medio de una guerra cultural contra su propia gente y sus tradiciones no es una institución a la cual van a querer enlistarse aquellos grupos otrora más propensos a hacerlo. Aquí Jeff Groom, en una nota en The Spectator que no puede dejar de leerse. Al hablar de los números de potenciales reclutas quienes exponen que temen sufrir daño físico o emocional o problemas psicológicos si prestan servicio, Groom escribe: "Pareciera que los últimos 20 años de guerra perdidas y miles de guerreros muertos o heridos hicieran reconsiderar sus opciones a los potenciales reclutas".
Más:
La congresista Marjorie Taylor Greene puede ser vulgar y rara algunas veces, pero ella fue electa, y su base electoral es el noroeste rural de Georgia, mejor lugar que existe para los reclutadores. Sin embargo, en abril, Green comparó unirse a las fuerzas armadas con "tirar a la basura tu vida", al citando el liderazgo militar incompetente y la influencia progre en el Departamento de Defensa como razón. Mientras Dan McLaughlin del National Review calificó sus afirmaciones como "marginales de la ultra derecha" y "muy lejos de la opinión de los votantes conservadores que van todos los días a trabajar", el actual estado de cosas pareciera verificar los dichos de Greene.
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| Los principales distritos de reclutamiento militar. |
Imagine que usted tiene 18 años, es varón, blanco, cristiano y de Georgia con una familia con historia de haber servido en las fuerzas armadas. A medida que usted pasaba por la adolescencia vio cómo las estatuas de próceres confederados eran volteadas y las bases militares renombradas, quitando del medio nombres y apellidos reconocidos y/o admirados; su cultura fue demonizada incansablemente como racista, deplorable y atrasada por sectores elitistas y los medios de comunicación; los líderes militares y civiles de la nación creen (o dicen creer) que la diversidad y la inclusión (traduzcase por menos hombres blancos) es la mejor forma de repartir la torta. ¿Usted se presentaría como voluntario? La política de identidad (N. de T.: de cuotas para minorías). Basureá a mi tribu y yo no me asocio con vos, mucho menos arriesgo tu vida por vos. No debería sorprender a nadie, entonces, que aquellos que expresan "gran confianza en nuestros militares" bajaron del 70% en 2018 a 45% hoy.
Por otro lado, si usted se suma a las FFAA [de EEUU] usted puede llegar a tener que compartir la ducha con un transexual, según órdenes del Departamento de Defensa. Así que además está esto.
El punto que hace Jeff Groom sobre los hombres cristianos blancos y las FFAA es más amplio aún. ¿Qué clase de lealtad se puede esperar que tengan por este orden social y económico personas que son permanentemente demonizadas por la clase gobernante del país - en los medios, en la industria del entretenimiento, por las corporaciones que buscan personal y lo entrenan, por el ejército y así con todos los sectores del país - ? ¿La lealtad se extiende a presentarse como voluntario a pelear en las guerras que el Establishment elige, el mismo Establishment que está en guerra contra estas mismas personas en su propio país? Ése es el tema con Diversidad, Igualdad e Inclusión que esta gente [los miembros de la élite] nunca entienden. En palabras de Groom: "las políticas de identidad trabajan para los dos lados".
La gente blanca que conduce estos programas son progres [N. de T.: "liberales" en inglés] lo cual significa que se odian a sí mismos y a la gente como ellos. No es broma, los progres blancos odian a los blancos:
Estos blancos progres piensan que toda la gente blanca debería ser como ellos: llenos de auto-odio y de odio a los blancos. Y, honestamente, me pregunto cuántos conservadores en los círculos de élite algunas vez los pararon. Nadie quiere que lo tilden de racista, o sexista, o fanático de ningún tipo. Fui parte de esas discusiones sobre "diversidad" en las mesas de redacción, y como cualquier otro conservador presente, sabía cuan falso era todo lo que decían, y que todo se trataba de redistribuir poder, y hacerles sentir culpa a los blancos con alguna posición jerárquica tratando de impactar sobre la neurosis en las espaldas de los blancos que no tienen tantos privilegios como ellos tienen. Pero todo eso mantenía nuestras bocas cerradas, porque sabíamos cómo soplaba el viento, y nos figurábamos que tal vez podíamos aguantar hasta que encontráramos una salida.
La gente tiene que trabajar, pero no tienen por qué trabajar en el ejército. ¿Para qué va a unirse a las FFAA [de EEUU] cuando los comandantes de más alta jerarquía creen que usted es una manzana podrida por ser hombre, blanco, cristiano y/o conservador, y lo pueden mandar ultramar a pelear en guerras interminables para extender el imperio americano, y hacer que el Donbass sea un lugar seguro para Raytheon y RuPaul's Drag Race [N. de T.: proveedor del ministerio de defensa de EEUU y un travesti que se dedica a las variedades respectivamente], muchachas que tienen penes y la Teoría Crítica de la Raza? En algún punto, te tenés que dar cuenta que todo es un fraude, que te están pidiendo que arriesgues tu vida para pelear el orden imperial, el mismo que piensa que tu manera de ser es un problema para los EEUU, cuando tu manera de ser es ser respetuoso de la ley, cristiano practicante, carapálida de derecha.
Groom llega a un punto muy valioso. Sostiene que ponerse en riesgo de muerte o de quedar inválido no previno que los norteamericanos se presentaran como voluntarios en el pasado. Algo distinto sucede ahora. Escribe: "La voluntad de pelear es la consecuencia natural de sentir una conexión física y espiritual con tu tribu". Así de simple: la clase que gobierna hoy los EEUU, -élite que comprenden a los militares progres -, está haciendo un gran esfuerzo para que una gran parte de la población de los EEUU, incluyendo aquellos más propensos a enlistarse, se sientan como parias y chivos expiatorios. De nuevo: ¿cuál es el punto de arriesgar tu vida por un sistema que te odia y que quiere oprimirte hasta reducirte a polvo, y luego enseñarle a tus hijos que son malos por su raza, pero ¡alégrense!, porque pueden ser trans.
* * *
Opinión de un lector:
El problema que enfrenta actualmente el reclutamiento militar es la convergencia de varios factores. Primero, casi ningún blanco educada de clase alta o clase media quiere entrar a las FFAA. Segundo, el hecho de que muchos norteamericanos jóvenes sean gordos y estén fuera de línea. Tercero, el hecho de que los EEUU no han ganado una guerra en 20 años, Cuarto, el hecho de que no hay rendición de cuentas para los mandos jerárquicos de las FFAA responsables de las derrotas. Y finalmente, el hecho de que los blancos de zonas rurales que constituyen la mayoría de la base objetiva de reclutamiento para personal de combate ve a los militares como incrementalmente hostiles a gente como ellos. Las fuerzas armadas pueden manejar uno o dos de estos puntos, pero todos ellos al mismo tiempo es imposible de contrarrestar.
* * *
Notas originales:
1. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trust-in-military-collapsing-wokeness/
2. https://spectatorworld.com/topic/no-one-wants-to-join-the-military/
3. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-military-at-war-with-americans/
A Military At War With Americans
Now others are noticing that a woke military that makes culture war on its own people and their traditions is not an institution that those demographic groups most likely to serve are going to want anything to do with. Here’s Jeff Groom with a must-read piece in The Spectator. Talking about the large numbers of potential recruits who say they fear that they will suffer physical harm, or emotional and psychological problems if they serve, Groom writes, “It’s almost like the last twenty years of failed wars and thousands of wounded warriors has made potential recruits reconsider their life choices.”
More:
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene might be crass and loony at times, but she was duly elected, and her constituents in rural northwest Georgia are primo real estate for recruiters. Yet in April, Greene compared joining the military to “throwing your life away,” citing incompetent military leadership and the influence of wokeness in the Defense Department. While Dan McLaughlin at National Review categorized her views as the “fringe of the far right” and “out of step with how ordinary workaday conservative voters think and talk,” the current developments seem to verify Greene’s claims.
Imagine you are an eighteen-year-old, white, Christian male in Georgia with a family history of military service. As you progressed through your teen years, you watched Confederate statues being torn down and military bases being renamed, endless media and elitist demonization of your culture as racist and deplorable and backwards, and military and civilian leadership that thinks diversity and inclusion (i.e. fewer white men) is best thing since sliced bread. Would you volunteer? Identity politics works both ways. Trash my tribe and I won’t associate with you, let alone risk my life. It shouldn’t be a shock, then, that those expressing a “great deal of trust and confidence in the military” dropped from 70 percent in 2018 to 45 percent today.
On the other hand, if you join the military, you might have the chance to shower with a tranny, per Defense Department order. So there’s that.
The point that Jeff Groom makes about white Christian males and the military is a broader one. What kind of loyalty should people routinely demonized by the ruling class in this country — in the media, in entertainment, in corporate hiring and training, in the military, and so forth — be expected to show towards this social and economic order? Does that loyalty extend to volunteering to be available to fight in the wars of choice launched by an Establishment that makes culture war on them? This is the thing that the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion people never, ever understand: that, in Groom’s words, “identity politics works both ways.”
The white people who run these programs are liberals, and that means they hate themselves and people like them. No kidding, white liberal hatred of whites is measurable:
These white liberals think that all white people must be like them: full of self-hatred, and hatred for whites. And honestly, I wonder how many conservatives in elite circles ever stand up to them? Nobody wants to be branded a racist, a sexist, or a bigot of any kind. I’ve been part of these “diversity” discussions in newsrooms, and like every other conservative present, I’ve known how phony they are, and how they’re all about redistributing power, and guilt-ridden white power holders trying to offload their neuroses onto the backs of whites who don’t have as much privilege as they do. But all of us kept our mouths shut, because we knew which way the wind was blowing, and we figured that maybe we could hold on long enough to find a way out.
People have to work, but they don’t have to work in the military. Why join up when your senior commanders think you are a bad seed for being white, male, Christian, and/or conservative, and they might send you overseas to fight in the forever wars to extend the American empire, and to make the Donbass safe for Raytheon and RuPaul’s Drag Race, chicks with dicks and CRT? At some point, you’ve got to realize that it’s a scam, that you are being asked to risk your life to fight for an imperial order that thinks your law-abiding, church-going, palefaced right-wing self is the problem with America.
Groom makes the valuable point that risk of death or injury has not kept Americans from volunteering in the past. Something else is going on here. He writes, “Willingness to fight follows naturally from a feeling of physical and spiritual connection to your tribe.” That’s just it: the ruling class in America today, including in the woke military, is going all-out to make a very large section of America, including those most likely to serve, to feel like they are outcasts and scapegoats. Again: what is the point of risking your life for a system that hates you and wants to grind you down, and later in life teach your kids that they are bad because of their race, but to cheer up, because they might be queer?
UPDATE: A reader writes:
The problem we face with military recruiting is a convergence of factors. First, almost no educated middle and upper class Americans want to join. Second, the fact that so many young Americans are fat and out of shape. Third, the fact that America hasn’t won a war in twenty years. Fourth, the fact that there is never any accountability in the senior ranks for failure to win wars. And finally, the fact that the rural whites who makes up the recruiting base for combat personnel increasingly see the military as hostile to people like themselves. The armed forces could have managed one or two of these, but all of them happening at once is beyond our ability to handle.
No one wants to join the military anymore
Our elites’ culture war has targeted the very Americans who traditionally enlist
July 12, 2022 | 10:09 pm
Last week marked the 246th birthday of the United States. This year also marks, according to Lieutenant General Thomas Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation, when we “question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force.” As reported in late June by NBC, all branches of the military are falling short of their 2022 recruiting goals.
The Army, for instance, has met only 40 percent of its enlisted recruitment target for the fiscal year, which for the military services ends on September 30. Those in the Pentagon tasked with attracting candidates have listed reasons they are struggling to meet their mission: lack of eligibility, Covid restrictions putting a damper on outreach, competition from a robust civilian employment market, and a lack of a desire to serve.
Despite unprecedented bonuses of up to $50,000 for enlistment and retention, the writing is on the wall. The youth aren’t lining up for Uncle Sam like they used to. And while all the above-mentioned reasons carry some weight, it’s the issue of desire that ought to be most alarming to the services. This crisis runs much deeper than a paycheck.
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According to Army Chief of Staff General James McConville, only 23 percent of Americans ages seventeen to twenty-four are eligible to serve without a waiver. This is due to obesity, drug use, or criminal records. Several years ago, that number stood at 29 percent. Even more troubling, an internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC showed that of those eligible, only 9 percent had an interest in serving. In the same survey, half of respondents thought they would suffer physical problems if they joined, and 57 percent thought they would suffer emotional or psychological problems. It’s almost like the last twenty years of failed wars and thousands of wounded warriors has made potential recruits reconsider their life choices.
The risk of debilitating injury or violent death has not historically prevented Americans from volunteering. Even during the first decade of the 2000s, as the United States invaded multiple countries and the military grew in size, there wasn’t a deficit. Of course, willingness to sacrifice is not uniquely American. As described in Ken Burns’s series on Vietnam, when recruiting villagers to fight the imperialist invaders, prospective guerrillas placed stones in their pockets to meet minimum weight standards. Willingness to fight follows naturally from a feeling of physical and spiritual connection to your tribe. The Pentagon’s recruitment efforts have taken this for granted, but current trends are working heavily against them. The critical headwinds they face can be broken down into two interconnected categories.
First, our citizens’ feeling of connection to the United States is beginning to wane. As detailed in Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, in 1991, when asked “How proud are you to be an American?” 96 percent said “very proud” or “quite proud.” Recently, Gallup released their similar annual poll, and found that 65 percent were “extremely proud” or “very proud.” Unsurprisingly, national pride was markedly higher among self-identified Republicans, men, those over fifty-five years of age, and those without a college degree. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the youth won’t sacrifice for something they don’t feel connected to. But if the groups highest in patriotic sentiment aren’t interested in serving in the same numbers as in the past, what else is going on?
In 2013, 44 percent of all military recruits came from the South. Georgia and Florida take the top spots in terms of enlistment rates while the Northeast lags considerably with the exception of Maine. Racial representation of the enlisted force remains consistent with overall representation in the United States. This leads to the second reason the Pentagon’s premise of connection is in trouble: the woke culture war.
As the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher said in December 2021, when commenting on the balkanization of military recruiting districts, “conservative American families are wondering why their sons and daughters should fight these foreigners on behalf of the same elite class that is waging culture war on them at home?” Calling it a “national security crisis created by the civilian and military leadership,” Dreher claims numerous military families have confided in him that they are steering their children away from service for this exact reason. Considering that, in 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits had a family member who served, recruiters should be alarmed. Whether the Pentagon understands this isn’t clear, but their leaders have yet to publicly acknowledge it.
These perspectives aren’t confined to opinion columns either. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene might be crass and loony at times, but she was duly elected, and her constituents in rural northwest Georgia are primo real estate for recruiters. Yet in April, Greene compared joining the military to “throwing your life away,” citing incompetent military leadership and the influence of wokeness in the Defense Department. While Dan McLaughlin at National Review categorized her views as the “fringe of the far right” and “out of step with how ordinary workaday conservative voters think and talk,” the current developments seem to verify Greene’s claims.
Imagine you are an eighteen-year-old, white, Christian male in Georgia with a family history of military service. As you progressed through your teen years, you watched Confederate statues being torn down and military bases being renamed, endless media and elitist demonization of your culture as racist and deplorable and backwards, and military and civilian leadership that thinks diversity and inclusion (i.e. fewer white men) is best thing since sliced bread. Would you volunteer? Identity politics works both ways. Trash my tribe and I won’t associate with you, let alone risk my life. It shouldn’t be a shock, then, that those expressing a “great deal of trust and confidence in the military” dropped from 70 percent in 2018 to 45 percent today.
The long-term health of the all-volunteer force that began in 1973 now appears to be in serious jeopardy. The general public’s declining connection and trust in the nation and its institutions paired with the elites’ incessant culture war targeting the very Americans who traditionally served in the highest numbers spells trouble.
The only silver lining might be that a lack of recruits will force a reduction in the size of the force and hence military spending. This might already be underway, with the Army announcing in March that instead of growing by 70,000 troops they will shrink by 12,000. The war machine needs human cogs to keep turning; we’ll see how they’re able to function without them.
Trust In Military Collapsing
Is the U.S. military’s reputation in free fall? It sure looks that way.
The Ronald Reagan Institute just announced that public confidence in the military has continued its precipitous drop. The institute’s November 2021 poll found that only 45 percent of those polled report “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military” — down 25 points in three years. The institute adds “Increasing numbers of Americans say they have little or not much confidence in the military, which is up 15 points in the last three years.”
The military isn’t the only public institution suffering a bad reputation, but it is used to basking in public esteem. As a result, it may not know how to recover.
It would be interesting to poll the public to ask why people are losing confidence in the military. Absent those data, hazarding a guess would probably be projecting one’s own gripes onto the situation. My sense is that it has a lot to do with the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, because I am not sure how aware people are of the Afghanistan Papers, and what they revealed about how much the US military brass lied for years about the situation there. If more people did know about the Afghanistan Papers, then that would definitely suppress confidence. You can’t blame what’s there on Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or any president, not really. That’s all on the senior US military leadership.
You can blame Obama and Biden, as well as the senior US military leadership, for the institutionalization of wokeness in the armed forces — and you can blame Trump for not doing enough to stop the madness. Word is getting around about what they have done, and are doing, to military culture. The brass is making enemies of the core people who serve. Look at this graphic from the Council on Foreign Relations. Red states generally provide a disproportionate number of recruits:
Take a look at this 2020 story from The New York Times. It says:
The men and women who sign up overwhelmingly come from counties in the South and a scattering of communities at the gates of military bases like Colorado Springs, which sits next to Fort Carson and several Air Force installations, and where the tradition of military service is deeply ingrained.
More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military.
For years, military leaders have been sounding the alarm over the growing gulf between communities that serve and those that do not, warning that relying on a small number of counties that reliably produce soldiers is unsustainable, particularly now amid escalating tensions with Iran.
To be sure, the idea of joining the military has lost much of its luster in nearly two decades of grinding war. The patriotic rush to enlist after the terrorist attacks of 2001 has faded. For a generation, enlisting has produced reliable hardship for troops and families, but nothing that resembles victory. But the military families who have borne nearly all of the burden, and are the most cleareyed about the risks of war, are still the Americans who are most likely to encourage their sons and daughters to join.
More:
The South, where the culture of military service runs deep and military installations are plentiful, produces 20 percent more recruits than would be expected, based on its youth population. The states in the Northeast, which have very few military bases and a lower percentage of veterans, produce 20 percent fewer.
See this map from the Times:
And:
The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor. And the racial makeup of the force is more or less in line with that of young Americans as a whole, though African-Americans are slightly more likely to serve. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s familiarity with the military.
“Those who understand military life are more likely to consider it as a career option than those who do not,” said Kelli Bland, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Recruiting Command.
One more:
In Los Angeles, a region defined by liberal politics where many families are suspicious of the military, the Army has struggled to even gain access to high schools. By law, schools have to allow recruiters on campus once a semester, but administrators tightly control when and how recruiters can interact with students. Access is “very minimal,” said Lt. Col. Tameka Wilson, the commander of the Los Angeles Recruiting Battalion.
Predictably, enlistment rates are low.
In 2019 the Army made a push to increase recruiting efforts in 22 liberal-leaning cities like Los Angeles. As part of that, Army Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy visited officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District in December to push for greater access.
“He was doing a sort of listening tour,” said Patricia Heideman, who is in charge of high school instruction for the school district and said there was a perception the military preys on disadvantaged students. “I told him from the educator perspective, we sometimes feel they are targeting our black and brown students and students of poverty,” she said. And therefore they are less likely to push enlistment.
So many military people — active duty, or recently retired — I’ve met this year in my travels in the US, or who have written to me privately, tell me that they warn folks to stay away from the woke military. Obviously this is anecdotal, but I hear it so often that I believe it reflects a genuine larger trend. If you are conservative, or white, or religious, or some combination thereof, why would you want to put your life on the line to serve an institution whose leadership and whose policies hold you in contempt, or at least consider you to be a culturally backward heathen in need of conversion to wokeness? When my middle son, now 17, was enthusiastic last year about the military, I told him that service is honorable, and that I would support him whatever he decided, but that I did not want him to be in a position in which he had to disobey his conscience or disobey his commanding officer. He got it. He no longer plans on going into the military.
He would have made a good soldier. This is a boy who was educated in the Greek classics, and in Christian faith. I asked him why he wanted to serve. He said, “To do right by my country, to gain honor, to find brotherhood, and to have adventures.” Seriously, that’s what he said. This kid is alone in our family in having almost no sense of irony. He is all heart, and he is always the first to volunteer to help people in need, especially if there is hard physical labor involved. And yet, because he is a white male of generally conservative disposition, and because he is a devout Christian, I am increasingly convinced, by what I read and by what armed forces members, and recently retired armed forces members, tell me, that the US military would see a kid like him not as an asset, but as a problem.
I could be wrong. But you hear this over and over from people who are in a position to know, and it’s hard to conclude otherwise. I recently heard from a fairly prominent public person, a conservative Christian who said military service goes back generations in his family, on both sides. He served, but has strongly counseled his children not to serve. I can tell this both breaks his heart and infuriates him, because a tradition of military service was something he wanted to pass along. But he can’t do it, because he has lost confidence in our military, because of the poison of wokeness — ideological indoctrination — coming down from on high, and forced on the ranks. The Pentagon is politicizing our military, and he wants nothing to do with it for his children.
According to the Times story, a disproportionate number of recruits come from families like his. I have no idea how widespread this phenomenon is — I mean, patriarchs (and matriarchs?) of these families warning their children off the military — but if it is a real issue, or becomes one, we have a national security crisis created by the civilian and military leadership. This is a version of a foolish war of choice: a destructive thing that was not forced on us, but that our leaders chose to do.
In light of the Afghanistan Papers and our humiliating withdrawal, nobody in the Pentagon leadership has paid a price. Nobody in civilian leadership has made them. We are decadent. We may well be the late Ottoman Empire. Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy is going to look utterly deluded if within two years both Taiwan and Ukraine are lost to the current world order and there is an increasingly ascendant and resilient competition to the West that doesn’t give a damn about our rhetoric or principles. The Ottoman Empire made great noise about being the absolute and total sovereign of the entire Ummah throughout its decline, but none of it mattered as Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, and Southeast Asia were all conquered and colonized by the European powers. The oligarchic technocratic progressivism has all the self-righteousness in the world but none of the actual willingness to fight. And it is demonizing and demoralizing the main population in this country that is willing to fight.
Even if the military were non-woke, I wouldn’t want my sons joining, because I do not trust the judgment of either the civilian or military leadership. We know from the Afghanistan Papers that the generals lie. Look at how the entire national security class in Washington, both liberal and conservative, are rushing towards conflict in Ukraine. Are they insane? This is the same leadership class that is presiding over the woke transformation of our armed forces.
Back in 2016, a reader of this blog was a Fulbright scholar, and sent to me photos of the handouts the State Department (which administers the program) gave his Fulbright class in their training session explaining how their task was to be cultural ambassadors for America. I wrote about it here. Excerpts:
The Fulbright scholarships are prestigious awards, funded by Congress, to hundreds of US academics and others to provide opportunities for study abroad. It is administered by the US State Department. A reader recently underwent a short course preparing incoming Fulbright scholars for their overseas deployment. He is going to study in a developing country. He tells me he was shocked by the instruction in gender ideology his group was put through as part of their briefing. They were instructed, he said to think about how they can be “an ally” to sexual minorities abroad.
He reports that his group sat through a speech about how backwards most foreign cultures are on sex and gender, and how they would all be ambassadors for cultural change in those benighted societies. Said the reader, “Any sensitivity toward differing cultural norms was couched entirely in pragmatic terms, relating, for example, to personal safety.”
He is a scholar with extensive experience living in the developing world, and this offended him. “The truly insane part, as I see it, is that this is a cultural exchange program. Ostensibly we are supposed to be fostering mutual understanding. [But] the message was clear: we are the tip of the spear of American cultural imperialism, and we are going to change these backwards traditional cultures whether they like it or not.”
Take a look at that post to see the two handouts. As I wrote back then (quoting a 2012 interview with an Obama administration official), this is all a deliberate decision the Obama State Department made to compel our diplomats — even at the level of Fulbright scholars — to become advocates of gay rights and gender ideology. Now the Pentagon is training our soldiers to be Social Justice Warriors, even to make war on themselves and their convictions if they don’t align with wokeness.
You have to ask: why exactly should non-woke veterans encourage their sons and daughters to put their lives on the line to serve an institution that will train them to hold their family traditions and moral and religious convictions in contempt? Moreover, why should these veterans encourage their children to serve a regime (= the ruling class) led by people who believe America’s role in the world is to spread values that demonize traditional Christians, and those who don’t share woke beliefs about race? These elites, including in the Pentagon, are making culture war on people like them at home, and simultaneously want them to send their kids to potentially make actual war on foreign people who are so backward that they don’t accept gender ideology and the rest of our decadent ideological package.
So, to recap: trust in the US military is collapsing. We don’t yet know why, but we need to find out. My supposition is that it has to do with some combination of the loss in Afghanistan, the lying that the senior leadership did for years about the situation in Afghanistan, and reaction to the senior leadership imposing wokeness on the armed forces. The military draws a disproportionate number of recruits from military families — and I have anecdotal evidence that some of these families are discouraging their kids from joining, because they believe from experience that, as one active-duty service member told me this fall, “this is not the same military that it was even two years ago” — this, a reference to the ideological program being shoved down their throats.
This is part of a broader culture war American elites are waging on segments of their own people. These are the same elites who are eager to wage culture war on foreign countries they consider to be insufficiently progressive on matters of sexual orientation and gender identity. Could it be that conservative American families are wondering why their sons and daughters should fight these foreigners on behalf of the same elite class that is waging culture war on them at home?
As J.D. Vance has said, once you realize the culture war is class war by other means, a lot becomes clear.
UPDATE: I want to be clear that I do believe that soldiers, sailors, and airmen should be expected to treat LGBT colleagues with respect. Whether it’s a good or a bad idea, the fact is that those men and women are in the military, and deserve respect. What I object to is the compulsory celebration, and the indoctrination with gender ideology. It is one thing to be taught respect for sexual minorities, but it is very much another to be forced to sign on to policies that compel religious and social conservatives in the ranks to not only respect their LGBT colleagues (a fair and sensible approach), but also to doubt and reject their religious and moral beliefs.
