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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.
While granting that it's probably a small part of the zeitgeist, who the hell wants these women for commanding officers? Worse than the general impression from the photo and worse still than the display of naked racial supremacy is knowing that the top brass above that will simply lie about plain statutes to protect these favored regime pets:
This is ridiculous! They're throwing up a classic gesture of racial and leftist politics. One finds it hard to believe that a group of white male cadets performing a Roman salute would be able to get away with claiming that it was mere unity and pride, and therefore a non-political gesture, worthy of no discipline.
Does this sort of thing matter? I genuinely don't know. I'm not hanging around 18-year old kids that are looking at entering enlisted ranks. I have no idea if they're even cognizant of these sorts of things. If they are, I would certainly expect it to be discouraging and demoralizing to know the politics of the officer corps and top brass.
Being working class, young, and male, I can chime in that young working class men mostly want very little to do with woke narratives that don’t benefit them, personally, and especially have very little interest in putting up with female authority figures pushing that crap on them, and are perfectly cognizant that the military is going through a ‘woke’ phase, but are not particularly monitoring military news.
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