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Notes -
John Carter: The Bud Light Military
(Or, to use the better title from the comments: "Achilles Shrugged")
I'm not familiar with the author, who seems to be yet another online right substackker. He asserts that America's military capabilities are being stretched increasingly thin (Ukraine, possibly Israel, potentially Taiwan) while the armed forces are missing their recruiting targets. This is the background to his main claim: that the core demographics of America's fighting force ("the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian regions, the good ol’ boys of the South, and the farm boys of the Midwest. Hillbillies and rednecks") have become so sick of the sneering racist abuse that they aren't signing up to fight any more, and while the US Army has tried to go back to a more "traditional" style of ad where white men parachute out of a helicopter, it's failed to bring back the volunteers. Carter compares a previous ad for the US Army ("Emma", the girl with two moms who operates Patriot missile defense systems, roundly mocked at the time by comparisons to a Russian recruiting ad) to the new ad that dropped on 11/6, "Jump" (Twitter, YouTube). Carter parallels it with the attempt at brand rehabilitation like the one Bud Light tried after the Dylan Mulvaney boycott, and if the comment sections of Twitter, YouTube, and his article are anything to go by, it's not going to work either.
It's a multitude of factors. The military is not very attractive career-wise.
Only people running out of choices or committed military-lovers would join. Perhaps they need to be more flexible with drug use in the military, it would make it easier to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Perhaps the NYT was wrong and American men are not desperate to go die for Israel after all.
The military was already purged of American patriots after the January 6th mostly peaceful elections protests, so let them have it. Feminism won, it's time to #DraftOurDaughters.
Exercising is right-wing, law enforcement is fascism, guns are evil...
The people who buy in the media narratives are not attracted to any of the day-to-day aspects of the military.
The people who do not buy them may not want to have to enforce these narratives on their fellow patriots at gun point.
Perhaps they're simply going back to white men in ads as they ran out of DEI actors without pending criminal charges?
You had three warnings last month, and one of them was specifically for posting "low-effort boo-light memes".
https://www.themotte.org/post/687/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/143928?context=8#context
You are doing it again. The warning didn't stick apparently.
3 day ban for now, please try and lurk some more and get a sense of the expected level of engagement and participation.
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