In every mass shooting’s wake, there are understandable complaints about mentally ill people acquiring guns. Yet the U.S. military is apparently putting guns in mentally ill people’s hands, as it’s now recruiting individuals “with a history of ‘self-mutilation,’ bipolar disorder, depression and drug and alcohol abuse,” as USA Today wrote back in 2017. The reason why concerns a problem that has only worsened since that report.
To wit: Armed forces enlistments have been plummeting, with Americans either unqualified or unwilling to join, write David Goetsch and retired Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North in a recent Townhall piece. Worse still, they lament, the situation isn’t being remedied because the powers-that-be won’t even acknowledge the problem.
How bad is it? “For example, the Army acknowledges an ‘alarming’ reduction in enlistments between 21,000 and 28,000,” relate the two. “Projections for 2023 are even worse.”
Laughably, pseudo-elites throughout government blame the manpower shortfall on, as Goetsch and North relate it, a “bustling post-COVID economy” in which young people can easily find lucrative jobs. In reality, though, many Americans are unqualified because they’re obese, have criminal records, and/or use drugs. Yet this isn’t even the worst of it.
Rather, that “America has come to a point in our history when we can no longer field a sufficiently sized military is the tragic consequence of poor leadership and WOKE policies of President Joe Biden, Pentagon incompetence, elitists who rule the Democrat Party, Marxist college professors and leftist ideologues who control our public schools,” to quote Goetsch and North.
Put differently, the problem is our civilization’s moral crisis, which has resulted in too many Americans being medicated, indoctrinated, and dissipated.
After mentioning leftist government-school brainwashing, Goetsch and North ask rhetorically, “Why would anyone taught since kindergarten to hate America want to serve in our military? Why would anyone who idolizes professional athletes for kneeling during our national anthem want to serve in a military uniform?”
“Why would combat veterans reenlist when forced to accept a steady diet of politically correct tripe that runs counter to their personal values on transgenderism, critical race theory and the LGBTQ agenda?”
“Who wants to serve under a feckless commander in chief like Biden who abandoned American troops and allies on the battlefield in Afghanistan?” they continue. “Finally, who wants to serve under a president who, at a time when all branches are struggling to meet enlistment and retention goals, is dumb enough to terminate tens of thousands of military personnel for failing to take a vaccination they don’t want?” (One that is unnecessary and dangerous, as well.)
It really is as bad as Goetsch and North say; in fact, the military boasts of its wokeness. Just consider the following U.S. Army recruitment ad, which features a “soldier” named Emma raised by “two moms.”
One positive thing can be said about the above spot, however: It looks good next to the below CIA recruitment ad, in which an agent on the job informs us she is an “intersectional … cisgender millennial” with “generalized anxiety disorder” who refuses to “internalize misguided patriarchal ideas.” (Well, take that, ISIS!)
Does CIA now stand for Centralizing Iniquity and Asininity?
Of course, the cynical might suspect that these appeals, the “vaccine” policies, and all the other wokeness are designed to alienate normal, more traditional Americans and attract liberal ones for the purposes of transforming the armed forces into a compliant, left-wing tool of an increasingly autocratic, Constitution-trampling state. But can this be effected without completely degrading the military? (If you don’t care if it’s too weak to tackle robust foreign opponents as long as it’s strong enough to trample domestic ones, this may be irrelevant.)
After all, the military’s appeals are a classic case of not knowing one’s market. The kind of people who might be enticed by wokeness are the same ones who, like Bill Clinton decades ago, may “loathe the military.” And the kind of people who’d normally be inclined to join it — young, patriotic, red-blooded, middle-American men — are turned off by woke ads.
This problem of armed-forces political correctness has been worsening for decades, and an experience I had approximately 20 years ago illustrates the problem. I encountered a young businessman, in his late 20s, I believe, who’d left the military. He looked like what he’d been: relatively muscular, athletic, robust, and clean cut. That he was also intelligent and apparently responsible and quite decent made him an ideal soldier candidate. So why did he leave the military?
He witnessed white men such as himself being passed over for promotions, in affirmative action’s name, in favor of less-qualified candidates. So he figured he’d instead try the civilian business world’s meritocracy. So much for the “color-blind” military.
None of this bodes well for our future, especially when considering our competition. Just consider the video below, which contrasts Chinese, Russian, and American military recruitment ads.
As the top commenter beneath the video quips:
The Chinese ad makes me want to join the Chinese army.
The Russian ad makes me want to join the Russian army.
The USA ad makes me want to join the Chinese or the Russian army.
Of course, it could be worse. The Swedish army has announced that supporting homosexual “pride” parades is as important as defending the nation from foreign threats. Now our pseudo-elites want Sweden to join NATO, too. And why not?
When it comes to orgiastic affairs, after all, the more the merrier.
