WOKE Military - Don't fall for political warfare

“He’s not just a pig, he’s stupid,”
Tucker Carlson on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Washington DC 26 APL 2023 [Originally published in Feb 2023 on LinkedIn]

Let's be clear - attacking a sitting administration and its policies is 100% fair game. It's what we expect a free and fair press to do.

Politically attacking the military as an indirect attack against a President is totally unacceptable. Because the military cannot counter attack a political assault, to do so would be partisan. Partisan attacks on the military make any response from the military partisan - which can then be legitimately criticized as partisanship.

This year will mark a major uptick in the politicization of the military as "woke" by Republican members of congress and their propaganda cronies. They have, and will continue to allege, that recruiting (one of many "crises") is down because the military is being "woke", despite none of the political/media accusers being able to define the term and presenting no evidence for the allegation. They just know it plays well on tv.

In a recently released study on junior officers decisions to leave, "Wokeness" is not citied as a concern. Poor leadership however, is a common theme.

The 'war on woke' (WOW) is pure culture war distraction and nonsense pedaled by adversaries who have an interest in stirring social divisions. They have been using agitprop like this for generations. However, this is the first time that Americans have knowingly enabled political warfare attacks on our own people.

The Russians have used race for years to divide Americans. KGB Operation INFEKTION put out that AIDS was created as a bioweapon at Ft Detrick and was spread by the black population.

Scratch at the language and examples of WOW and you find a claimed repulsion toward 'diversity and inclusion initiatives' (which BTW the Army Secretary and other leadership have stated is essential to closing the recruiting gap).

Who knew seeking diversity and inclusiveness would be so contentious? Clearly it would insult white nationalists, but what about everyone else? In this sense, "woke" seems to be a 'polite' subversive substitute for the N word, eg. "those woke people are damaging our military" and so on.

Since Korea, the US has not won many wars

WOW and related political warfare initiatives, are a red herring to distract from a real war we and our allies are fighting and winning.

In 2023 we are winning a major global war against the "friendship without limits" axis as they seek regional conquest within their spheres of influence (Ukraine/Taiwan) and to undermine the coalition of democratic states led by America.

They have an interested in creating internal divisions in the US and Europe to weaken our resolve to resist their aggression. US Pro-Putin media outlets have been working hard to discredit the astonishing achievements of a small country resisting war crimes and genocide against civilians. Likewise, they are ramping up attacks on the US military to make it appear weak and divided. It is not. Propaganda matters because of the perception v reality imbalance.

The Ukrainians have crushed the RU military for pennies on the dollar of US support, while preventing the spread and/or escalation that Putin desires to hide his breathtaking mistakes.

WOW also distracts from the immense deterrence value the Ukraine war has in curbing China's desired aggression towards democratic Taiwan.

Ask yourself, who would benefit from distracting and dividing Americans while we and our partners are winning one war and deterring another?

You don't have to be Otto von Bismarck to work it out.

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Update - Taiwan is urging the US not to abandon Ukraine

“Ukraine’s survival is Taiwan’s survival. Ukraine’s success is Taiwan’s success,” Taiwan’s representative in Washington, Bi-khim Hsiao, told the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum last weekend. “Our futures are closely linked.”

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Update - The Tucker Firing

Two stories out in todays early bird are worth reading.

1. Politico - ‘Good riddance’: Pentagon officials cheer Tucker Carlson’s ouster

2. Defense One - How Tucker Carlson Helped Turn Americans Against the Military

Let's be clear - attacking a sitting administration and its policies is 100% fair game. It's what we expect a free and fair press to do. Criticizing Pentagon policies, decisions, outcomes is fair game. As the worlds biggest and most complex enterprise, it is going to make mistakes, errors of judgement and outright blunders, that rightfully deserve exposure and correction.

Politically attacking the military as an indirect attack against a President is totally unacceptable. Because the military cannot counter attack a political assault, to do so would be partisan. Its a conceit that propaganda outlets use all the time and it needs to be called out.

The Dominion law suit and $787.5 million payout exposed Fox as a propaganda outlet willing to constantly and repeatedly lie about the most consequential threat to American democracy since the 1850s and 60s. Fox fermented, incited, and then covered up a coup. It knew it was lying but it did not care.

Fox Corp. chair Rupert Murdoch testified he didn’t believe the election fraud claims.

Off air Carlson called former President Donald Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer” and said, “What he's good at is destroying things … He's the undisputed world champion of that” and added that “I hate him passionately”. On air he was a sniveling obsequious propaganda running dog.

Host Sean Hannity testified he “did not believe … for one second” that Powell’s voter fraud claims were true and it was “obvious” Powell’s allegations were false when she appeared on his program, also saying far-right attorney Rudy Giuliani was “acting like an insane person” and calling the lawyers “f’ing lunatics.”

Their only motivation was fear of losing viewers or as Murdoch so aptly put it, “It is not red or blue, it is green”.

The threat to US national security continues because Fox was not forced to admit its crimes on air. Most of their viewers are completely unaware of the $787.5 m payout or its cause. Fox is not telling them.

The power of propaganda is such that J6 would not have happened without Fox constantly and repeatedly inciting its viewers to action. They told their viewers the election was stolen WHEN THEY KNEW FULL WELL IT WAS NOT. They hosted guests THEY KNEW HAD NO EVIDENCE of a stolen election. Fox amplified and repeated all the lies from all of the Trump cronies to the point that their viewers truly believed the election was stolen and saw it as their patriotic duty to overturn the election at the last chance to do so on J6 - forcefully if necessary.

Had they been forced to expose their actions to their viewers that would be one thing. They are free to continue all the lies and will do so to keep their viewers from going to even more extreme outlets - such as those calling for all democrats to be executed for an election everyone knows was as ordinary as any other.

Fox is a cancer on American national security. It should be cancelled across the US Military TV network as a matter of national security. Its pro-Russia anti-democracy propaganda is a threat to this country. Putin no doubt cannot believe how stupid we are.

Fittingly Russian state TV offered Tucker a job. This is not satire.

It gets worse - tears for Tovarich Tucker

https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1651378649893855233