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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.
Nobody cares about this country anymore. We live in a country where people just want to take without giving anything back. There has always been some of this in every society, but today it's endemic in the West. Even without the mass immigration and anti-white propaganda this author is worried about, I don't think people would be joining the military. There was a 9/11 bump and I think there was still a bit of the old spirit of America in millenials and gen x, but those days are gone now and they aren't coming back. I honestly think if 9/11 happened today, half this country would say we deserved it. I'm part of the problem too since I'm doing literally nothing about this except complain on the internet.
I was watching some random youtube recommendation, and they were talking about Britain not meeting recruiting targets either. And one of them quipped "Nobody wants to fight and die for an economic zone."
I may not have gotten the words precisely the way they said them.
All the same, it hit the mark for me. You fight and die for a nation. A nation that performs some combination of representing and defending your values, family, and prosperity. These days the governments of our open borders economic zones actively undermine our values, attack our families, and pillage our future.
That's a bit of an over-simplification, isn't it? Mercenaries have been a thing all through history, but it's an economic zone isn't going to inspire a volunteer army.
Why should I not simply open the gates of the city if I feel that the rule of my external enemy would be less repressive than the enemy that already rules over me?
(Alternately: if the women aren't putting out for me, what would the enemy fucking them change? If I don't fight, I'll probably survive; if the enemy is more enlightened than my culture so much the better for me. The women can defend themselves- they keep asserting they can anyway.)
This is the defining question of what a nation is. The fact that Western societies aren't currently at war with each other (mostly because they're American protectorates, but also because nobody's managed to onshore the resources and manufacturing know-how to be able to credibly threaten their neighbors) is ultimately what has allowed the vast majority of those nations to be consumed by what is, at a population level, husband vs. wife power struggles.
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An economic zone that cannot or will not pay its soldiers sufficiently well that they are willing to fight because the pay is worth it considering the risk does not deserve the name of "economic zone". It's legitimate for economic zones to exist, and there are benefits of being an economic zone rather than a nation, but if a geopolitical body goes that route they should not expect to reap the benefits of being an economic zone while getting culturally-unified-nation levels of devotion in their armed forces.
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