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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.
What jumps out the most about this substack piece is the writer's remarkably over-inflated sense of self-importance. This ad may very well have fallen on deaf ears (or maybe it didn't, idk. Like someone else pointed out, it came out a week ago), but his evidence for that is that it was mocked on dissident RW twitter, which does not exactly have its finger on the pulse of American public opinion, or even American right-wing public opinion. Later he claims that Assadist gas attacks were an attempt by "the regime" to manufacture consent for, I guess an invasion of Syria (?), but that this was narrowly thwarted only by anons on twitter and 4chan ("weaponized autism").
As a sidenote, the author takes a bunch of jabs at the "official" 9/11 story over the course of his article, pretty clearly indicating he believes it was a US government op done with the help of the Mossad ("dancing Israelis" etc.) I haven't looked particularly deeply into 9/11 conspiracies but I've never understood what was supposed to be so ridiculous about passports being recovered from the crash sites. The official story is that three out of nineteen hijackers' passports were found semi-intact, two of them in Shanksville, where one would expect the recovery of onboard items to be significantly easier than at WTC or the Pentagon, since it was an empty field with nothing else around.
Well, that did happen a couple times... But even then, I dont't think Mexican immigrants as a rule are agitating for the return of Texas or anything. What an odd narrative he tells.
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