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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29533 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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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.

I did not enlist in the military when I was younger because I did not make the cut medically, even after carefully tailoring my statements to be not-exactly-lies as my recruiter instructed. As such, I have no firsthand information on this topic.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I do have some interesting secondhand information about this topic. I have quite a few friends and family who are active military, and every single one of them has told me that the higher-ups are pushing pretty much anyone who can string two words together into a sentence to move into recruiting. I have a few coworkers who did their time and got out who are receiving attractive offers to go back into the service, but specifically as recruiters.

While those facts could be coincidence, it does suggest there's a level of concern brewing in the upper ranks.

As @JTarrou mentioned below:

But there might be a kernel of truth that the sort of people who generally staff the pointy bits of the military are increasingly skeptical of their role as the enforcers of a world order that is explicitly hostile to them, their families, states, politics and demographics.

The gym where I lift has a pretty hard driving, ooh-rah, red-white-and-blue bloooded, America Fuck Yeah clientele. In the last three years, I've heard far more anti-government and anti-military sentiment than I had in the decade prior. A lot of it seems to stem from the fact that the COVID vaccine mandate, whether intentionally or not, was a de facto soft purge of that kind of person. I've heard the literal phrase "die for Israel" come out of more than one recent high-school graduate's mouth at as they hang around the squat rack.

This is anecdotal, but I spent the weekend with deep red tribe boomercons who just a few years ago would have been talking about the need to hit Iran before they can hit us- the sentiment was that the USA is fucked up and overextended with a government that’s increasingly telling lies to try to drag out their time before the music stops, foreign entanglements are mostly wrongheaded, and the government is as hostile to its own people as to anyone else. ‘Crimea is part of Russia but I don’t like Russia. Ukraine needs to admit they lost.’ ‘Israel is a wealthy country and should pay cash for their weapons.’ ‘The government and the media lie to us about race to cover up for the dysfunction in black culture, why should we take the blame for it? Without whites they’d be living in mud huts, or be someone else’s slaves.’ ‘The government is importing as many illegals as possible to make it look like economic growth so they can get away with running up a deficit.’

Just a few years ago it would be ‘the economy will get better, all this gay stuff’ll blow over, we need to hem Russia in on the world stage’. The red tribe disillusionment with the federal government is real, and since recruiting is mostly from the red tribe, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t affecting recruiting.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I do have some interesting secondhand information about this topic. I have quite a few friends and family who are active military, and every single one of them has told me that the higher-ups are pushing pretty much anyone who can string two words together into a sentence to move into recruiting.

Yep. They just hey-you-ed a bunch of people trying to fill recruiting ranks.

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