March 28, 2024 2:09 PM
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Opinion: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us – Gregory Hood

[Disclaimer: The views expressed in opinion pieces on the PrescotteNews website are solely those of the authors. These opinions do not necessarily represent those of the staff of PrescotteNews or its publisher.]

The military can’t meet recruitment targets. NBC reports that the Army is well below 50 percent of its annual target, with just three months left in the fiscal year. The Air Force is also behind by about 4,000 men. The Coast Guard has filled just over half of the active-duty enlistments it needs. The Marine Corps will probably meet its target, but is struggling. “This is arguably the most challenging recruiting year since the inception of the all-volunteer force [in 1973],” Lt. Gen. David Ottigon told the Senate on April 27. The Space Force will reportedly meet its goal, but the new branch needs only 500 “Guardians.”

Few young Americans are even eligible for military service.

The Hill reports:

The number of Americans qualified to join the military is getting smaller. Of the nation’s 31.8 million 17- to 24-year-olds, only 9.1 million meet the initial requirements. Of those, only 4.4 million meet academic requirements. The pool is further reduced by those who have police records, drug/substance abuse issues, or are obese. These factors rapidly shrink the initial pool of 31.8 million to about 465,000 attractive recruits, many of whom will have opportunities in the private sector.

Military.com reports just 23 percent of Americans aged 17–24 are eligible for service. According to the CDC, in 2017–2020, more than 22 percent of Americans aged 17–24 were obese.

There’s another problem. According to an internal Defense Department survey, just 9 percent of young Americans eligible to serve “had any inclination to do so.” The tradition of a military family is dying off. NBC reports that of Americans in the target age for recruiting, just 13 percent had parents who had served. In 1995, 40 percent did.

One problem may be the economy. Though inflation is high, the job market is tight and Americans have other options.

The military is increasing sign-up bonuses — up to $50,000 for highly skilled recruits, and the House Armed Services Committee recently passed an “inflation bonus” for servicemembers making less than $45,000 a year. You can also get a “quick-ship” bonus of $10,000 if you agree to go to basic training right away. Some recruits get to choose where they will serve. The Army has polled Generation Z to find out what else what else would be attractive, such as more time for recreation. This is not Chesty Puller’s Marine Corps; it’s summer camp.

July 10, 2019 – Staff Sgt. Ashlin Kohus commands her Marines during Final Drill at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C. (Credit Image: © U.S. Marines/ZUMA Wire/ZUMAPRESS.com)

If the military can’t win young Americans with money, it will lower standards or recruit foreigners. The NBC story said the Pentagon may try harder to get DACA-recipient illegals. Americans no longer need a high school diploma or a GED to enlist. The Army lowered physical fitness standards for women and older soldiers because too many couldn’t pass. The Army is now allowing tattoos on hands.

Lowering standards won’t work. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara tried to use low-IQ soldiers in the Vietnam War. “McNamara’s Morons” ended up causing great harm, but he defended the program; he said it would cut black unemployment.

There are other problems. About 40,000 National Guard soldiers may leave the service because they refuse the COVID-19 vaccine. In February 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered an extraordinary stand-down to hunt for “extremism.” The military raises its thought-crime standards as it lowers other standards. There has been a moral panicwith stories in the New Republic, Politico, NBC, and others about “hate groups.” Some servicemembers lost their careers because they were “extreme.” If you are an American patriot in the mold Washington, Jefferson, or Hamilton would have recognized, the military does not want you.

The brass has shifted dramatically against white conservatives, especially Southerners. In late May, the Army recommended changing the names of American bases named for Confederate generals, including Fort Bragg and Fort A.P. Hill. The Army is teaching Critical Race Theory at West Point. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley told Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) that he wanted to combat “white rage.” He also paid tribute to George Floyd in July 2020, saying he was “personally outraged by George Floyd’s brutal and senseless killing” and that “as a nation and as a military, we are still struggling with racism.” White pride or Southern pride are forbidden, but the Army’s official website posted this article: “Serving with pride: LGBTQ Soldiers celebrate diversity, speak their truth.”

Admiral Michael Gilday put Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist on the Navy’s reading list. The Pentagon has its own “diversity, equity, and inclusion” program, three things it calls “necessities” for fighting wars. Bishop Garrison, senior advisor to Secretary Austin “for human capital and diversity, equity, and inclusion,” says he wants to see a “data driven approach” to understand why the percentage of non-whites drops as officer rank increases. “What is the problem,” he asked, “and how can we address it?” I have some ideas, and so do you. I don’t think Mr. Garrison wants to hear them.

Patriotism has been declining, even among Republicans. Trust in the military is down. A Pew poll released in February found that only 25 percent of Americans say they have a “great deal of confidence” that it will “act in the best interests of the public.” That’s a drop of 14 points from just the year before. An astonishing 85 percent of Americans think the country is moving in the wrong direction, and President Joe Biden’s approval rating is lower than ever. He’s a miserable Commander-in-Chief.

In Samuel Huntington’s classic, The Soldier and the State, he wrote that the military built a conservative, hard-nosed officer class. Today, military values, at least at the highest levels, don’t appear much different from Oberlin College’s. America’s recruitment ads tout progressivism and female empowerment in contrast to Russia and China’s traditional messages of nationalism and manliness. The private sector and civilian government undercut patriotism all the time. So does the military.

There may be something deeper. The United States has developed a powerful combination of soft and hard power that it can use to destabilize foreign foes. So-called Non-Governmental Organizations, often funded by the State Department or financiers such as George Soros, are a base for activists who destabilize foreign governments that challenge American interests. They stir up unrest and even topple governments.

There were “Color Revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia, and Serbia. American-funded activists invented symbols that were alternatives to the government. They started mass protests that provoked the government. Much of the English-language media then blasted the authorities and increased international pressure. If local elites defect from a government, it may fall. “Strategic non-violence” is preferred, but some activists may be armed, giving local leaders a choice between surrender or civil war.

In 2010, David Horowitz described the strategy in Shadow Partyshowing how “humanitarian aid” can be used to undermine foreign police, military, and intelligence agencies. Croatian president Franjo Trudman argued in 1996 that Mr. Soros was “setting up a state within a state.” Mr. Soros’s funding helped bring down the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic, leading to Kosovo’s separation from Serbia as a new Muslim nation in Europe. (p. 235)

In August 2003, George Soros declared his intention to bring the “Open Society” to the United States. One could argue that he and others like him achieved their supreme triumph with the “secret plan that saved democracy” that Time bragged about after the 2020 election, with coordination among groups that supposedly have differing interests (such as major corporations and labor unions) to defeat Donald Trump. Time called this “saving” democracy. What if Vladimir Putin and his allies used the same tactics?

Russia has always been the main prize. Vladimir Putin is popular because many Russians believe that he tamed the oligarchs who plundered the country. With President Putin out of the way, foreigners could once again buy up Russian assets. President Putin seems aware of the danger, which is why he banned foreign-funded NGOs. Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko is doing the same, much to the displeasure of Radio Free Europe, American state media.

NGOs and paid activists aren’t enough. There must be an ideology that pushes people. The “woke” rhetoric about “decolonizing” white countries is the framework for breaking up geopolitical rivals like Russia and China.

The United States and English-language media criticize China’s attempt to force the Muslim Uighur population to assimilate to Chinese culture. The US also criticized China’s response to anti-government riots in Hong Kong. In response, China blasted the treatment of January 6 rioters. China cleverly defended its campaign against Islam by claiming it is an emancipatory struggle for women’s rights.

Credit Image: © Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire

Unfortunately for Russia, it is a white country, so critics can declare their true intentions. The State Department recently held a summit about the need to “decolonize” Russia. “Russia has yet to attract appropriate scrutiny for its consistent and oftentimes brutal imperial tendencies,” the State Department warned. One of the participants of the panel, Casey Michael, had written in May in The Atlantic that Russia must “lose what empire it still retains.” “Russia’s history is one of almost ceaseless expansion and colonization,” he said, “and Russia is the last European empire that has resisted even basic decolonization efforts.”

Worries about self-determination could equally apply to Europeans ruled by Brussels or Americans under an increasingly alien District of Columbia. American leaders, including conservatives, are indifferent to the replacement of the historic American nation but eager to pick fights abroad in the name of Chinese Muslims or Tibetans. Russian and Chinese leaders, less indifferent to their own populations, will obviously oppose “decolonization.” They might start making similar arguments to promote local independence movements in Vermont and Hawaii.

To his credit, Casey Michael is consistent, and sees the war to dismantle Russia as part of an effort to destroy our own imperial remnants: “[M]uch of the U.S. still refuses to view its own history as one of rote imperial conquest, from the Founding Fathers seizing Indigenous lands to the ongoing colonial status of places such as Puerto Rico.” We have a duty to decolonize Russia, it seems, but the true war is always against our inner racist. It’s the same mythology popular culture tells us about World War II. We are a racist country but may yet redeem ourselves by fighting racism abroad and at home, even if it means dragging reactionaries into the modern age through violence.

Christopher Mott, a former desk officer at the State Department and a research fellow at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, calls this the ”Woke Imperium.” He argues that “when older rationalizations for primacy, hegemony, and interventionism appear antiquated or unpersuasive, a new rationale that better reflects the ruling class norms of the era is adopted as a substitute.” Thus, the “woke,” activist-driven, social-justice politics — with a base in academia, media, and what Dr. Mott calls the “professional managerial class” — has “provided the latest ideological justification for interventionism.” America’s role is to spread “progressive universalism,” and because this requires allegiance to new values, there is a “new institutional and elite consensus around trending shibboleths.”

Sam Francis wrote in Leviathan:

Soft managerial regimes expand organizationally, through the organized manipulation of the economies, societies, cultures, and governments of nations and regions that are formally outside of their apparatus. Managerial globalism thus tends to assimilate non-managerial societies by developing the infra-structures of mass organizations in the states, economies, and cultures of local areas and by instigating the emergence of local managerial elites. New managerial regimes are thus integrated into the global economy, communications networks, and trinational political structures under managerial dominance. The goal of the elite is not the physical conquest of foreign territories and populations but their assimilation — as homogenized mass markets, mass audiences, and world citizens — within the structures of mass organizations.

This is global homogenization, or “GloboHomo.” It’s to combat this system that Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin calls for a multipolar world and the survival of separate empires and cultural spheres that can resist American homogenization. In Mr. Dugin’s view, the “woke” ideology is simply the latest mask the West wears as it continues its quest to dismantle Russia and other rivals.

Aleksander Dugin (Credit Image: © Russian Look/ZUMAPRESS.com)

Still, reducing everything to realpolitik and geopolitics misses the moral element of what’s happening. “GloboHomo” is also a sly reference to homosexuality, which has become the “uniform” of America’s global empire. The intersectional flag, which includes the gay rainbow, symbols for other sexual identities, and black and brown stripes to include non-whites, is now the true American flag. It’s the flag of the new government that will “decolonize” not just the world, but America. A recent New Yorker cover that tried to show the difference between progressives and conservatives fell flat because the leftist’s house was flying the American flag. That’s not realistic. The Left has its own banner. We, it seems, are still stuck with the government’s flag.

A Tweet from Paige Williams

The intersectional flag is now an international symbol of allegiance to the new order, one that exclude straight whites. There’s been a sudden rise in “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” or, in English, whites claiming they are trannies. However, a new paper argues that much of this may be driven by “socially contagious” media trends. The truth may be simpler. People respond to incentives, and heterosexual whites (and successful Asians who don’t claim victimhood) do not get benefits from the Potomac Regime. Many of the newly invented sexual fetishes or mental illnesses are attempts by whites to win victim status, something I argued last year. Self-mutilation is part of the ancient tradition of geldings who want to serve the imperial court. You don’t even need to mutilate yourself; just say you “feel” like a certain gender on any given day.

A Tweet from Sophie Corcoran with the comment, “The only flag that should be flying above London is the British flag.”

“Wokeness” is a dumbed-down Critical Race Theory that can be a weapon against foreigners. It breaks down national unity and undermines leaders. It invents classes of victims who owe more allegiance to an American-led financial, military, and cultural system than to their own country. It buries traditional racial, ethnic, and religious identities with the tempting promise of a prosperous global economy and a universally triumphant progressive social order. “Liberal democracy” is then carefully protected by media censorship, government limits on “misinformation” and “hate speech,” and occasional brute force.

This system seems both stronger and weaker than it has ever been. In 2014, Dan McCarthy raised the question of whether liberalism is Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” or a mere accident owing its hegemony to American empire.

Liberal democracy is unnatural. It is a product of power and security, not innate human sociability. It is peculiar rather than universal, accidental rather than teleologically preordained. And Americans have been shaped by its framework throughout their history; they have internalized liberalism’s habits and rationales. Not surprisingly, they have also acquired the habits and rationales of empire — and now they must understand why.

Our leaders long ago abandoned the wisdom of George Washington’s Farewell Address and seek monsters abroad to destroy. The sense that it’s America’s duty to uphold the global order is so ingrained that I see no way it can be purged without American power being totally broken. However, the ideology itself will speed that destruction. Michael Anton aptly called the meritocratic American empire we see in the wildly successful Top Gun: Maverick a “Boomer fantasy” — an alternate America in which the country kept the colorblind promise of the civil rights movement.

In the real world, there never was a “colorblind” moment. America was founded to be a white nation for ourselves and our posterity. Leftists, including Martin Luther King, always wanted special benefits. There is no way to make America a multiracial, multicultural, universal “nation” without throwing out the historic nation. The real war that must be fought is not against Russia, but against ourselves. That war was already fought and won by the Left in 2020 and early 2021, and we’re occupied territory. White American conservatives refuse to believe it, but it’s true.

Here we see the essential problem with what some call the Globalist American Empire (GAE). When the German Empire delivered Lenin in a sealed train to Russia, the Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war, but also forged a weapon that destroyed Germany in the next world war. Similarly, “wokeness” could be a powerful weapon to destabilize or even dismantle Russia, China, and other rivals, but it will also cause blowback against America. Why should blacks, Hispanics, Asians, sexual minorities, women, and all the other “victims” fight for a System that our own rulers say is evil? Why should Americans defend a country they are taught to be ashamed of?

This doesn’t mean that “tough” Russian or Chinese leaders will necessarily triumph over decadent America. Authoritarian states have their own problems of corruption and inefficiency. The fierce Ukrainian resistance is fueled by passionate nationalism that the media hate until it becomes useful. Russian propaganda is also incoherent, making absurd claims about Ukraine being run by “Nazis” while Ukraine’s Jewish president hobnobs with liberal celebrities. The Globalist American Empire — what I prefer to call the Potomac Regime — may well triumph by breaking the will of young Russian soldiers and by overwhelming Russia’s blundering media outlets. The Western press tells tales, but it tells them well, and propaganda works.

But not forever. America is ultimately sapping the mystic chords of memory. This country could not have a draft; too many young people would defy it. The few who do want to defend their country — young conservative whites — risk a dishonorable discharge because of their politics. America now has commitments to defend Eastern Europe (including potential new NATO members Sweden and Finland), Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. One miscalculation could lead to a war we cannot win.

Machiavelli reminds us that Cicero was wrong and that the sinews of war are not “infinite money” but good soldiers who love their country. Why would people who came here just to make money sacrifice for America? Why should young whites fight and die when their own commanders call them racist?

With the Fourth of July upon us, it’s worth asking what we’re celebrating. To much of the country, “Juneteenth” is the true Independence Day. This isn’t just because academia and media have taught us self-hatred. It’s because we aren’t independent.

We can’t control our borders. Non-white migrants cancel out our votes. Our rulers teach our children that American victories over Indians, Mexicans, or other non-whites were crimes. Wokeness, or what we should call anti-white hatred, saps our country’s spirit from inside. It’s beyond hypocritical for our rulers to demand loyalty to a polity they have subverted and turned against the people that founded it.

If America is “white supremacy,” treason is patriotism. Of course, if America were as “racist” as the woke claim, we wouldn’t have foreign seditionists. The Founding Fathers assumed America would remain white (and Anglo-Saxon), and we’d be far better off if they had spelled that out.

America’s Independence Day should force us to think in new ways. Whites have more in common with other Westerners than we do with many of our “fellow citizens.” The Potomac Regime treats Middle America with the same disdain as Russia and China. Even as it picks fights abroad, the geriatric American ruling class appears weak, incompetent, and confused, trying to run a system that may simultaneously be stronger and weaker than ever before. It still has terrifying power but struggles to keep baby formula in the stores.

It’s time to say what the sons and daughters of Europa demand. It’s time to become who we are. The regime that governs us derives its legitimacy from a twisted morality of victimhood. It cultivates weakness and resentment as a strategy to undermine both enemies abroad and dissidents at home. We must be free of it.

There are two possibilities. We can take over the state. Instead of victimhood, America would fight for greatness, accomplishment, and success for people of all races. The American flag — the only flag we would recognize — would be a standard to which “the wise and honest can repair,” in Washington’s words. This is the moderate position.

If non-white resentment makes restoration impossible, then “white nationalism” is the only solution. It is absurd to live under a system in which we are automatically guilty and always will be.

July 4 is no longer a day of commemoration, but aspiration. The “Woke Imperium” is a force for destruction. We must either save America or break free and make something new that saves what’s worth saving from the Old Republic. The Potomac Regime — the dysgenic, destructive, death-dealing monstrosity that acts in our name — is not our government. In its determination to push “wokeness” on the world, it has become the common enemy of mankind.

Obey its laws. Don’t do anything violent or stupid. But you owe it no loyalty or respect. We defeat the Potomac Regime, the Empire of Lies, by ignoring it and working for a new Independence Day.

Happy Fourth of July. Spare a thought for those who gave their lives for this country and resolve to avenge the sacrifices they made for rulers who didn’t deserve them.

A US Army soldier from the Old Guard places flags in front of grave sites at Arlington National Cemetery. The Old Guard has conducted Flags-in, when an American flag is placed at every headstone, since 1948. (Credit Image: © Rachel Larue/Planet Pix via ZUMA Wire)

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One Response

  1. The goal of Communism is not a one world utopia. It rather is the process of removing countries culture by turning groups within those cultures into self identifying elements that want government to carry them to a secure level if they will accept the role of a obedient subject of government directives. The demoralizing of America’s military from the highest political offices is well underway in America. The question today is will enough American voters soundly reject this venue and elect patriots who believe in the American culture as 402 years proudly provides. MAGA

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