Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative
A Military At War With Americans
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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.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-military-at-war-with-americans/
