Chris Bray on the largely self-inflicted damage suffered by the US Army during the last few years, leading to (among other things) significant recruiting shortfalls:
The American military is running a social trust test for the larger society, and the results are remarkably clear.
Remember that the Biden administration opened with an ideological assault on the armed forces, ordering a training stand-down to harangue servicemembers about politics.
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While the public framing was vague, the training wasn’t: It ran in a single direction. Servicemembers reporting on their “extremism” training to members of Congress described sessions in which the military warned them against white nationalism and the dangers of far-right sentiment, but didn’t mention Antifa (or ISIS, but whatever), hammering the January 6 narrative but deflecting questions about riots and arson in the summer of 2020. In uniform, troops did “privilege walks” and unpacked their white privilege in supervised discussions. Extremism, it turns out, is only one kind of thing, on a single end of the political spectrum.
Pursuing the theme of politically purified armed forces, three retired US Army generals published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a political commissariat in the American military: “In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.” More domestic political spying will make our institutions healthy, they explained.
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The result of woke leadership, politicized military service, Covid vaccine mandates that decline to take safety concerns and religious objections into account, and wars fought for no point or objective:
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And a generation shrugs.
The military is only the most obvious, most centralized example of a burgeoning withdrawal from institutions crippled by lost trust. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment declined by 662,000 in a single year. Meanwhile, public school enrollment in California is imploding. The LAUSD, which was closing in on 800,000 students twenty years ago, is now moving in the other direction, and closing in on 400,000.
Institutions can shit on people, and push them past their limits, and make absurd and unkind demands of them. Until they can’t.
There will be more of this.
The problem is less being woke and more that the 18 – 24 year old males that were normally drawn to serve in the military no longer seem to exist. For decades citizens of our countries decided to serve, sometimes just for a job, and sometimes because they actually were proud of their country and thought it was the right thing to do. Over the past 20 years, through immigration and our “elites” both in Canada and the USA, kids are taught to despise their countries. If they are of a pale hued background they are taught that they are the problem and there is nothing to be proud of either. Colonizers, robbers, cheaters, whatever denigration they can toss out there unchallenged, the kids have to soak it up. If you step in and dispute it, you are a racist.
So after all that, no wonder no one believes in duty and honour. No wonder no one wants to serve and possibly give their life for their country. They hate their country and it makes me wonder how long we will last, as a country.
Comment by Dwayne — June 30, 2022 @ 16:42
But the woke folk doing all of this also firmly believe that conservatives are too thick to notice and that they’ll continue to provide warm bodies to become the next generation of brainlessly loyal myrmidons for the state and will always follow orders even if those orders are unconstitutional and directed at the civil population. Cognitive dissonance is a condition that they believe only afflicts morons on the right.
Comment by Nicholas — June 30, 2022 @ 18:39