Trump Narrows the Field for Veep

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

The clock is ticking toward the Big Pick – who is Trump going to select to be his veep nominee? Usually, we would find out around the time of the convention in mid-July, but the President might want to do it sooner. He’s a master showman and will drop the news when it will have the maximum effect, but that Democrat judge in New York might make him announce his selection through one of those glass booths at Riker’s Island – which, judging by the support and money Trump got when the kangaroo kourt temporarily framed him, might just lead to Trump and the lucky selectee winning in a landslide.

The regime media has announced that Trump asked several potential picks to submit vetting paperwork. Why someone in Trumpworld would leak this info to the regime media is a good question – either it’s a calculated move for attention, in which case we should celebrate the exploitation of the garbage legacy journalists for our own purposes, or someone gets off seeing his leak up in lights. The Trump campaign has been remarkably tight-lipped this go around, as opposed to in the past when the middling MAGA types in the inner circle were still acting like it was the olden days when political players called up the N.Y. Times to dish. I’m going with exploitation – I bet the Trumpians are ruthlessly using the regime media to get the message out. Who knows, it might be Trump personally doing it. 

I’ve talked about this before, but a vice-presidential pick must have four qualities. He/she must not hurt the ticket or the party. He/she must be able to do the job. He/she must bring something specific to the table to help win in November. And most importantly, he/she must not have bragged about killing any puppies. But enough about Kristi Noem – she’s not on the list and none of the eight have a known mutt mortality rate.

The alleged candidates for being candidates are, in alphabetical if not alpha order, 

Doug Burgum, Ben Carson, Tom Cotton, Byron Donalds, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Elise Stefanik and J.D. Vance. I like them all in the sense that I could live with any one of them in the job, considering that the job basically consists of having a pulse. All of them are certainly better than Kamala Harris, but that is the lowest of bars. My dog Barkey would be a better VP than Kamala Harris, and she licks her own butt, which beats having licked any part of Willy Brown. 

Let’s see how the alleged candidates rate. 

Doug Burgum, the Dakota governor who has not wasted Lassie, is an older, rich white guy like The Donald. Can our ticket stand two of them? Yes, because people inclined to vote for Republicans do not care about race, and they do not care about gender as long as it’s one of the two that exist. He’s smart and a good gov, solid and steady. In that sense, he’s Pence without the preachiness – a soothing presence for the wavering moderate R’s who look at the senile Biden and don’t want to vote for him again but who look at Trump and literally shake at his Trumpiness. His biggest flaw is that he’s on the edge of being too old at 67, but did I mention he’s rich? And that he’s got rich friends who would write checks. This guy meets each of the three criteria. He’s a solid choice.

I adore Ben Carson, and I would call him if I needed brain surgery. But you need brain surgery if you think he’s the right choice. First, he’s too old at 72. Second, Carson is nice and kind, but we need someone who will gleefully humiliate Kamala. Third, he brings no one new to the ballot box. Yes, he’s black, but Republicans don’t care, and Democrats will call him Uncle Tom. The fact is that the race of a Republican is irrelevant. Ben Carson is a great American, but he fails on criteria three – he adds nothing to the ticket.

I like Tom Cotton’s ambition and military record. His Senate seat is safe GOP. He’s more traditionally hawkish than Trump, which might create an issue. He’s also young – he has the Ben Shapiro vibe of a super-smart guy who strikes you as about a decade younger than he is. He could certainly do the job, but what does he bring to the table? Arkansas? He’s another guy who stumbles on the third essential quality of a pick.

Congressman Byron Donalds is a solid guy with no executive experience. He’s on the list because he’s good on policy and MAGA adores him. The regime media hates him, a plus. He is young, which is good, but he’s also from Florida, creating an unnecessary constitutional hassle over residence. He’s black, but being black is not relevant for a Republican nominee. It’s fair to ask what he brings to the table besides people who were already going to be at the table. Who out there is not now voting for Trump but will if Byron Donalds gets on board? No one.

It’s weird to see Marco Rubio on the list, but after nearly a decade he may be past his immigration heresy and embarrassing 2016 performance. He can do the job, and the establishment loves him. He is youthful. He brings along the people Burgum would reassure, but he also has his immigration baggage (some of us have long memories) and he invites a Florida residence controversy. In addition, leaving office would mean a big Florida Senate seat fight that we would not be absolutely guaranteed to win. Here is the big question – why would Trump pick Rubio if Doug Burgum gives him the same benefits without the hassle?

Tim Scott is another nice guy. The donors will like him, but the donors will like several of these folks. He’s black, but that doesn’t matter in our party – it gets us no Democrat votes. The moderates love him, but that’s because he’s soft – really soft. He won’t tear down the establishment; he will try to bring everyone together for a group hug. Scott simply does not have the killer instinct. He does not want to leave Kamala twitching on the floor of the debate stage – that’s not who he is. His campaign was awful, and he sets up an uncertain and expensive Senate race. He wants the job, but not so he can rain down fire and brimstone upon his enemies. Pass.

Who is Elise Stefanik again? I mean, I know who she is, but why her? She’s done some good stuff in Congress and she seems to have a killer instinct. But she’s not going to bring along New York state. Being female will not help us either – no one is voting for a GOP ticket because the veep candidate identifies as a woman. Like the other Congresscritter on the list, Byron Donalds, it is unclear if she has the kind of executive experience required to be President, though Kamala has proven you can be a clinical moron and inhabit the VP job. Stefanik would be fine in the job, but she would not help the ticket so that she would get the job.

And then there is my home state homeboy, J.D. Vance. He’s kind of my dream veep. He’s based and ruthlessly smart. He wants to burn, loot, and pillage the establishment. That’s great for me, but maybe off-putting to the squares. He puts a Senate seat at risk and that’s not nothing. It’s also unclear what he adds – everyone who might vote for the ticket because J.D. is on it is already voting for the ticket without J.D. on it. He’s batting .667 on the criteria. That said, he’s so solid Trump may take the chance.

So, to sum up, I would be happy to have any of them in office. I would most like J.D. Vance to be in office. But should that “performance in office” qualification rank higher than the “winning the election” qualification? A dispassionate analysis would suggest Burgum, but passion plays a part. I think Trump will choose Burgum or Vance, maybe Scott. Everyone else is a wild card.

So, what will Trump do? Any damn thing he wants. Like cats, he reacts to stimuli we cannot sense. Who knows what he is thinking, but you know, after nearly a decade of Trump-centric politics, I’m inclined to trust his gut.

Of course, this regime media list could be fake news, just like the rest of the stuff it spews. There are some key names missing. Glenn Youngkin is an obvious one – current polling says Virginia is close and he could put that state in play. There’s also Nikki Haley, who recently, through gritted teeth, sort of endorsed Trump. Of course, she not only burned her bridges but bombed the rubble until it bounced. It’s unclear why others who ponce had buzz, like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, are not on the list; it’s pretty clear why Kristi Noem isn’t. Woof, woof, bang, bang.

Who knows what will happen? Who knows what Trump will do? Probably not even the President. But this is, after all, Donald Trump’s show, and the master showman loves a good surprise ending.

On Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, and Reasonable Doubt

 Coleman Hughes wrote a column in these pages that set off a flurry of criticism. Here, he sets the record straight.

Back in January, you may recall that Coleman published a column in these pages called “What Really Happened to George Floyd?” which took stock of a documentary about the death of George Floyd and the trial of Derek Chauvin. In the months that followed, the journalist Radley Balko wrote a three-part, 30,000-word essay tearing into Coleman’s 2,000.

One reason Coleman’s essay is so long is that he is responding to the many charges of factual and interpretive error leveled against him by Balko. There are also a lot of facts to cover, and a good deal of context, from medical examiner reports to police training manuals. But there is another reason for the length of Coleman’s important piece. 

Balko’s critique, though styled as an exhaustive set of granular corrections of the factual record, was made in the service of refuting a claim that Coleman did not make about Derek Chauvin’s innocence.

The nature of this misunderstanding is important. As Coleman patiently explains, the asymmetry of their approaches grows out of his own focus on the concept of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In a criminal trial, this does not simply allow for the presentation by the defense of possibilities that may or may not prove true—since truth is never a foregone conclusion—it demands their consideration by the jury. 

And it tasks the prosecution with the burden of dispelling the shadows of doubt so vital to protecting the rights of the accused, whoever they may be.

Radley describes a still larger purpose of his essays this way: “But this also isn’t just about Hughes’s column, or the documentary. It’s about an insidious counter-narrative that has been picking up momentum on the far right for months, and is now seeping into more mainstream outlets.”

Mischaracterizing Coleman’s review as an argument for Chauvin’s innocence (it was not; it was an argument that Chauvin was not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt) allows Radley to treat it as part of an insidious “counternarrative” derived from the “far right.” 

In other words, Coleman’s good-faith effort to understand Floyd’s tragic death, the challenges of policing, the role of race and media, and the tangled complexity of criminal and social justice in our contentious, narrative-saturated moment are recast by Radley as something else—something dangerous.

Coleman announced his intention to wait until all three parts of Radley’s essay were posted before responding, but he invited Radley to debate him at The Free Press or on his own podcast in the interim. 

Radley refused—unless Coleman immediately published corrections of facts whose accuracy and interpretation were to have been the subject of the debate. These clarifications are provided in Coleman’s essay below, which also restores the context in which they were discussed.

Radley’s statement about “insidious counternarratives” continues: “Hughes’s article—and the reaction to it—shows how the claims made in TFOM [the documentary] are being laundered through more respectable, ‘heterodox’ media outlets, podcasts, and pundits. 

Hughes himself just published a book, and was flatteringly profiled in the New York Times. He was on Bill Maher’s show, and will be moderating a panel discussion on Gaza (of all things) in New York later this month.”

Leave aside for the moment Radley’s insulting surprise that Coleman might moderate a discussion about Gaza. 

The vehemence and volume of Radley’s attack, with its whiff of conspiracy and presumption of bad faith, doesn’t just argue for Chauvin’s guilt, but for the complicity of Coleman, The Free Press, and all who approach the story in a manner at odds with his own understanding, if only by leaving room for a gray zone where he sees black and white.

In a tweet following the first installment of his essay, Radley wrote:

“Yesterday I demonstrated how Coleman Hughes amplified the lies about George Floyd’s death churned out by a nutty, conspiratorial ‘documentary’—making him either complicit or a dupe.”

In Balko’s binary understanding, Coleman is either a conspiracy nut or a fool. 

Though the last line of the tweet—“Today, Hughes got a flattering, book-hawking profile in the NYT”—seems the most telling. 

For anyone to take his work seriously, or perhaps especially to grant him safe passage through the pages of The New York Times, is an affront to Balko’s own Manichean vision. 

I could go on, but let’s get to Coleman’s essay. This piece—and all of his work—is respectful of the gray zones. Examining plausible alternatives that may or may not prove true is not only the way our judicial system protects the accused from ideological conviction. 

It is also useful for journalists, especially in an overheated and partisan age where truth is often the first casualty. 

Bari Weis

******************

Coleman Hughes Essay Next Posting

X22, On the Fringe, and more- June 13

 

Combatting Our Homegrown Enemy

posted by Ed Thompson at American Thinker 

There is a War on America. This isn’t a threat of nuclear missiles from some foreign adversary like Russia or China. It is not about the Ukraine, Gaza, or Taiwan. This war rages right here on American soil and is being fought by home-grown and sometimes hidden armies dedicated to destroying all that is right and good for America and frankly, the rest of the planet.

Before you conjure up visions of armed white supremacist militias sporting shaved heads and Swastika tattoos stockpiling weapons on a remote compound in the hills of Montana, stop. That is the fever dream the enemy is pitching, a misdirection flanking tactic in the War on America. J6 was never an insurrection at all, certainly not worse than 9/11, Pearl Harbor, or the Civil War. The Proud Boys were never seditious conspirators hell-bent on armed rebellion. Donald Trump is not Satan, Putin, and Hitler combined, an evil fiend determined to put all people of color in chains. That is, as Biden might shout out angrily in non-sequitur fashion, malarkey, another bill of goods that the real enemy wants to sell you to justify tightening the noose around those few freedoms that we have left. Those big lies are meant to push you cowering into a corner where you will hand over your freedoms, always for the greater good, as civilization dies with a whimper, not a bang.

The homegrown enemy are not foreigners, although the open border may provide millions more recruits to the cause. No, this army was trained right in our universities and schools. You are paying for your own destruction. Neat trick if you can pull it off. The enemy has been busy.

Over the past four years we have been subjected to severely altered and unreliable elections that bear little resemblance to the standard of elections from just a decade ago. We were forced to take an unproven shot, forced to cover our faces and stand six feet apart, forced to stay in our homes, all based on lies and exaggerations fed to us by our own government. We are force fed lies by the mainstream media on a nearly continuous basis, while the government censors the truth. The national debt clock spins out of control while the ensuing inflation drives more Americans into poverty. Any attempt to get injunctive relief disappears into a gaping abyss where the once-vaunted American legal system used to be.

What has happened to justice in America? Where are the constitutional jurists, the judges and lawyers who are committed to mete out justice fairly and blindly to everyone and to uphold the laws and constitution? With so many examples of injustice being wrought upon us it is an easy question to ask. A look at what is being taught in the top law schools gives part of the answer. When it comes to making lawyers and judges, the Marxism of social justice and DEI, and the racism of anti-racism and BLM have overshadowed the long-standing traditions of jurisprudence and the constitutional norms that have protected the freedom that made America great.

The Left, and that starts with Joe Biden at the top, have been doggedly denouncing Donald Trump and his supporters who are called MAGA extremists. The Left would like no better than to minimize and marginalize this group as small, fringe, and radical, a dangerous cult deserving extermination. Easy observation belies such desperate claims. Compare the meager few following Biden to the overflowing crowds anywhere Trump appears. These tens of millions of American patriots embrace many political ideas, but they are united in wanting to save America from her enemies.

That enemy has seized power in the institutions and is loath to give it up. First came the overprosecution and excessive punishment of the patriots who came to the Capitol on J6 to protest a clearly skewed and irregular 2020 election. Some have committed suicide, others were tortured and most were bankrupted, but all had their lives ruined despite being decent citizens without prior crime. It is almost four years later and the arrests haven’t stopped.

You would think two failed impeachments on trumped-up charges and a proven phony Russiagate investigation would have taught the Left a lesson in humility.  Not the enemies of America. They launched an avalanche of indictments against Trump not in one, but in four different jurisdictions, under city, state and federal laws totaling an astonishing ninety-some felony counts with a potential for hundreds of years in jail. The fact these crimes were sketchy at best and manufactured at worst makes it bad. But that they were brought against a former U.S. president who happens to be the front runner likely to be re-elected to the White House is unconscionable and near republic-ending.

When the biased jury read their predictable guilty verdicts on all 34 felony counts, the corrupt judge had to hide his face in the courtroom so none could see the hideous Joker grin he was unable to suppress. When the guilty verdicts were announced in Manhattan, the TV talking heads cheered, calling it a wonderful day of majesty and a miracle of justice. The madmen in Hollywood howled with delight. The only miracle that day was that the sun didn’t go dark to mark the death of justice in America. You could certainly feel the wheels grind to a halt.

Radical Islamists diametrically oppose western values and the freedoms we cherish, and they demonize Americans and Israelis as great evils that must be killed. This is certainly not all Muslims, but bringing any anti-American radicals into our country is a recipe for disaster. And that is why the enemy within wave them right in.

The radical Marxist Left in our universities is indoctrinating students to hate the West. Our public education system teaches anti-West CRT, DEI, and anti-racism and reframes American history as primarily being about slavery, white supremacy, and colonialism. Promoting gender confusion to our children destabilizes the family structure that has been the backbone of Western civilization forever.

If you like America and the ideals it represents, would you bring the seeds of destruction into your country? Of course you would not. Only an enemy would do so. This gives us the lens with which to find and identify those individuals and groups who are waging war against America. They are right here among us. Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that 19 of the 21 great civilizations he studied were destroyed from within.

As bleak as the American landscape might currently look, there is reason for hope. While these days you don’t hear many great orators waxing eloquently on the virtues of America, those virtues do exist. The French writer and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, after touring America, wrote about them. He saw that Americans came together to form voluntary associations which allowed them to pursue common interests and goals. He credited the freedom of speech, assembly, and the press for creating a vibrant and dynamic public sphere where citizens could debate and discuss public issues, and providing the means for citizens to participate in the political process, shape public policy and hold their government accountable. Although dimmer than at any time in our history, these freedoms do still exist. We must exercise them to the fullest to right the American ship.

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was written at a time when the United States was still a relatively young nation. He pondered the future of democracy and the potential challenges it faced. He believed that democracy was a fragile and imperfect system, and that it required constant vigilance and effort to maintain. He was right. The time for that vigilance and effort is well past due.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

Welcome to 

The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

Here’s a place to share cartoons, jokes, music, art, nature, 

man-made wonders, and whatever else you can think of. 

No politics or divisive posts on this thread. 

This feature will appear every day at 1pm mountain time. 

Tucker Interviews Steve Bannon About Upcoming 4 Month Prison Sentence

Steven Bannon is the former White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to President Donald Trump. Mr Bannon currently hosts The War Room podcast on Rumble and is very familiar to CTH readers.

Steve Bannon was subpoenaed by the politically motivated J6 Committee, then referred for criminal prosecution when he refused to comply with their demands citing “executive privilege.” After a political trial and DC conviction, last week a federal judge instructed Bannon to report to prison on July 1st to begin his 4-month sentence for the misdemeanor crime of refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena.  The entire background is completely enmeshed in political targeting.

Tucker Carlson discusses the upcoming prison sentence with Steve Bannon. WATCH:

The Only Question I Have Is: When Does the Terrorist Incident Occur, Before or After the Nov Election?

Duke reporting for RedState 

I'm going to address a topic that I've danced around in some of my posts over the past couple of months, but now I feel it's just time to come straight out and ask the question directly because I feel the writing is definitely on the wall. I don't think that rational, well-meaning people can continue to ignore the evidence of the stories that we have seen since January 20th, 2021 when Joe Biden assumed the office of the presidency.

That simple question is this: When do you, the reader, expect a terrorist incident to occur this year — before the November election or after?

I think it could happen at any moment now.

Of course, maybe you are one of the few who could be asking aloud why I think there's going to be some sort of trouble. I'm going to assume that anybody asking that in good faith possibly has not been paying attention to what the 46th president has done since he assumed office over three-and-a-half years ago, and you have missed all of the stories about a wide open border in the south.

This story from Bonchie, posted over a year ago, chronicles some of the idiocy of the Biden policy — Democrats Are Trying to Rewrite History on the Border, but We Have the Receipts. From that post:

But while those three want to pretend to be tough on the border, and by proxy, tough on the Biden administration, the receipts exist showing that when push came to shove, they folded. As the following thread by Sen. Mike Lee explains, Sinema, Manchin, and Tester had the chance to do the right thing and force an amendment that would have fixed the Title 42 problem. That would have happened in the most recently passed omnibus bill.

Together with Republicans, the three Democrats could have shut down the process and made sure that Title 42 was extended legally. They had all the leverage, and there’s little doubt that Sen. Chuck Schumer and Biden would have been made to capitulate given everything in the bill they wanted to get passed.

Instead, Sinema, Manchin, and Tester bent the knee. And for that, they now own this crisis as much as anyone else. So they can put out their tough-guy statements, but we know the truth, and hopefully, voters won’t forget it come 2024.

Fentanyl is just one part of the disastrous policy of letting anybody walk in that Biden and his team along with his fellow Democrats in Congress have complained about while looking the other way. Of course, the other part is the type of people streaming across the border that might have an ax to grind with the everyday citizens of this country.

Just like these folks who might have some ties to ISIS yet were welcomed into our country by the southern border — Eight Suspected Terrorists With Ties to ISIS Nabbed in Three Separate Cities - All Were 'Fully Vetted.' 

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin released the FBI//DHS joint statement to his X feed.

It gets worse. A New York Post correspondent, Jennie Taer, did the initial reporting on this bust, including purported results of a wiretap:

The sting operation was first reported by the New York Post’s Jennie Taer. 

According to Taer's report, part of the investigation featured a wiretap which revealed one of the now-arrested individuals was talking about bombs.

"Remember the Boston marathon [bombing]? I’m afraid something like that might happen again or worse," one of the sources told The Post.

With the stories that I've read both here at RedState and elsewhere, the question of when we get hit has been at the front of my mind. However, after watching the Sean Ryan podcast with Ret. General Robert Spalding the question of when morphed into: Will it be before the election or after?

Spalding in the interview above is asked by the host on a scale from one to five how worried he is about an attack on our power grid.

The General's response was: six.

So for those of you contemplating right now how Democrats could steal the 2024 election, what would happen if the majority of the country lost power, and how much of a wrench would that throw into election day in the fall of 2024?

See why I'm thinking about probably before rather than after the election?

And let me be frank here: Even if it happened after a Trump win, the majority of the country getting the switch thrown to the power going out by the Chinese or the Russians would not be a good way to start off next year. This dilemma falls 100 percent on the Biden administration and their disastrous policy of eliminating the Trump executive orders, which kept the border in much better shape than it is now.

This is a problem created by the Democrats who were afraid to speak up when the Biden administration changed the rules that were working under Trump. The country is definitely going to suffer for this dereliction of responsibility, and we, the American people, are going to pay for it.

Greatly.

IRELAND Migrant charged with destroying crypt in 1,000-year-old Dublin church containing mummified remains of Crusaders

 A man has been charged in relation to the investigation of a fire which is believed to have "destroyed" the remains of five historical mummified remains at St. Michan's Church in Dublin.

Christian Topiter, 38, appeared before the Dublin District Court earlier today charged in relation to the fire at the church crypt where remains are housed including the 800 year old remains of a man known as 'The Crusader'.

For the Irish Mirror Tom Tuite reported that Topiter has "various addresses and had a Romanian travel card" and "was detained at a north Dublin station overnight" although Garda witnesses said they were not 100% certain of his identity.

The court heard that Topiter had been living in a hostel about 200m away from the scene of the incident and that around 4pm a tour guide had become aware of fire and raised the alarm.

Water damage is reported to have caused the remains to become unsalvageable.

Tuite reported details of a bail arrangement in respect of the accused writing that, "the defence submitted that Mr Topiter had an immigration identity card issued by gardai, was presumed innocent, and would obey conditions."  

Speaking to RTÉ News, Archdeacon of Dublin and Vicar of St Michan's Church, David Pierpoint, said the incident was "disastrous for Dublin, for history and for the parish". 

"The parish depends on income from our tourists and if we've no crypts to show people, then we have very little money coming in," he said.

"We're not sure now what's going to happen," he said, adding that he believed the remains of people involved in the Crusades were damaged beyond any hope of salvation.  

St. Michan's Church was originally founded in 1095 and is the oldest parish church on the north side of Dublin   

https://gript.ie/man-appears-in-court-charged-with-destroying-historical-remains/  

If Only Our Military Prioritized Winning Wars As Much As It Did Celebrating LGBT Radicalism

The military’s obsession with LGBT radicalism and other neo-Marxist ideologies is undercutting its overall readiness.

Shawn Fleetwood reporting for The Federalist

At a time when war is raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, the U.S. military is busy flaunting its support for LGBT insanity.

The most recent example came earlier this week when Stars and Stripes, a left-wing outlet, revealed that airmen stationed at Osan Air Base in South Korea are authorized to wear a “pride morale patch” on their uniforms this month to celebrate leftists’ made-up “pride month.”

A photograph of the patch published by the outlet shows an LGBT flag encircled by a black ring with the words “Osan+” and “Osan Air Base ROK” on it. Capt. Michelle Chang told Stars and Stripes the patch “represents the advancement of the Air Force’s commitment to diversity, inclusion, dignity, and respect within the mission.”

The patch was devised by Osan Plus, a pro-LGBT organization created at the base in October, according to the outlet. Tech. Sgt. Brittany Ortega, the group’s president, said getting the patch approved was easy and added that “our leadership really, really just wants to promote the acceptance of LGBTQ service members and their families.”

As cringe as it may be, Osan Air Base’s promotion of “rainbow jihad” isn’t the military’s most embarrassing display of fealty to LGBT radicalism this month. Stars and Stripes separately reported Friday that Marine Corps Installations Pacific, which oversees branch operations in the Pacific, went out of its way to respond to Facebook users criticizing its post celebrating “pride month.”

One user and alleged service member by the name of Eduardo Flores blasted the command for making the post, writing, “The USMC does not take pride in a sexual agenda that continues to be shoved down our throats. Servicemembers do not wish to continue being associated with a sexual movement that has nothing to do with the military and what we do.”

An MCIPAC-operated account responded to Flores’ comment with the motto, “Once a Marine always a Marine,” before referencing branch policy on discrimination that includes references to so-called “gender identity.”

The command issued a separate comment claiming it “understand[s] that this is an issue that many people feel strongly about,” but that “supporting pride aligns with the Marine Corps’ values of honor, courage, and commitment.”

A Force in Decline

The military’s infatuation with DEI-style ideology isn’t new. The force has openly commemorated leftists’ rainbow holiday for years, even going as far as using taxpayer money to transport service members to military-sponsored “pride” events.

What defenders of these needless celebrations refuse to acknowledge, however, is that the military’s obsession with LGBT radicalism and other neo-Marxist ideologies is undercutting its overall readiness.

Since Joe Biden assumed the presidency, the military has experienced its worst recruiting crisis since shifting to an all-volunteer force in the early 1970s. Every branch in the service, with the exception of the Marine Corps and Space Force, missed its recruiting targets for the 2023 fiscal year. The Army, Navy, and Air Force missed their goals by roughly 10,000, 7,400, and 2,700 recruits, respectively.

Data obtained by The Daily Caller earlier this year indicates the ongoing crisis is “likely” being fueled by a significant drop in white recruits. Military.com, a left-wing outlet, published similar findings regarding Army recruitment in January. The outlet noted how “[n]o other demographic group” has experienced such a downward trend in recent years, adding that the “rate at which white recruitment has fallen far outpaces nationwide demographic shifts.”

At the same time it’s promoting LGBT insanity, the military is also ignoring critically important infrastructure problems throughout the service. America’s naval fleet is rapidly shrinking, with ships going into retirement faster than manufacturers can produce them. The Pentagon has compounded the problems by spending recklessly on faulty ships and aircraft that experience routine problems and cost millions (if not billions) to repair.