Are these the end-times? There’s been a lot of speculation along those lines in the last few years.
Of course, there are always reasons to believe that our time is up. But the last three or four years have provided more than the usual amount of grist for the mill.
It’s difficult to capture the exact sequence of events because everything seemed to happen all at once: the advent of woke culture, followed by rioting in major cities, accompanied by the tearing down of statues in public squares and the trashing of history in public schools, followed by a worldwide pandemic, followed by…well, just one damned thing after another—including drag queen story hours and satanic Christmas displays.
But if you’re looking for a single sign that the world’s going to Hell, my candidate would be the queering of the U.S. military. I’m not talking specifically about the gaying of the Army—although that’s a large part of the problem. I’m speaking about the strange new priorities that the military has chosen for itself.
One might think that defending our country and winning wars would be the chief priorities. But these seem to be lower-order priorities in today’s military. Instead, the chief concerns are climate change, diversity, LGBTQ+ pride, white supremacy, and right-wing extremists.
Recently, for example, Carlos Del Toro, the new Secretary of the Navy, announced: “I have made climate one of my top priorities since the first day I came into office.”
Climate change? A top priority for the Navy? Even Dr. Strangelove wasn’t that crazy. Do Del Toro’s superiors know about this? Well, actually, they do. At the Leaders Summit on Climate held on April 22, 2021, Earth Day, Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, declared that “no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis.” He continued, “we face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”
Climate change may or may not pose a long-term danger to our planet. But the word “existential” implies an immediate threat to our continued existence. Russia’s huge stockpile of nuclear weapons poses an existential threat. So does Communist China’s growing arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles.
Luckily, we have the Air Force Global Strike Command—the direct descendant of the Cold-War-era Strategic Air Command—to defend our country against whatever the Russians and the Chi-coms can throw at us.
Unluckily, it’s not at all certain that the Global Strike Command is in safe hands. Although the Global Strike Command controls dozens of nuclear-capable strategic bombers and over 400 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, the Command itself was, until recently, under the command of an outspoken racist.
Luckily, General Anthony J. Cotton is no longer in command of Air Force Global Strike Command. Unluckily, he has been promoted to head the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), which is responsible for “strategic nuclear deterrence, global strike, and operating the Defense Department’s Global Information Grid.”
But is General Cotton a racist? That depends on your point of view. From one point of view, it’s impossible for Cotton to be a racist since he is black. And according to a theory subscribed to by some blacks and some whites as well, blacks can’t be racist. However, as Daniel Greenfield pointed out in a FrontPage piece, Cotton has made statements that, coming from the mouth of a white person, would certainly be considered racist. For example, in 2020 he told Air Force Magazine: “When I see what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks—and the list goes on and on…that could be me.”
Cotton is also a proponent of “diversity and inclusion training” because, he says, diversity is a “warfighting imperative.” Such training could conceivably create a bond between airmen of diverse backgrounds, but it could also lead to more divisiveness. And since the Air Force leans heavily on the critical race theory thesis that all whites are unconsciously biased, divisiveness seems the more likely outcome.
General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also defended the teaching of critical race theory in the military because it would help him to better understand whiteness and “white rage.” “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it,” he said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. Note that Milley takes it for granted that “white rage” is a widespread phenomenon and a well-established fact.
We could go on about Milley’s fear of white rage and white extremists, but that wouldn’t leave space to discuss another of the military’s chief priorities—namely, the advancement of the LGBTQ+ agenda.
I’ve already mentioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s concern over climate change, but Austin also concerns himself with the changing climate of social opinion. Not long after taking office, Austin gave the opening remarks at the Department of Defense Pride Month event. Here’s a sample:
Throughout American history, LGBTQ+ citizens fought to defend our rights and freedoms—from the founding of our nation to the Civil War, from the trenches of the World Wars to Korea and Vietnam, and from Afghanistan to Iraq.
And so on. But if you are a devout Christian soldier who believes that your faith prevents you from supporting the LGBTQ+ agenda, you’ll probably start counting the number of days left before your term of duty is up. Likewise, if you’re a devout Christian who is thinking about signing up for the Army, you’ll think twice. You may decide that you’d rather not fight and die for values that run strongly counter to your own.
You can see where this is going. By deliberately appealing to one group, the military risks alienating another group. Indeed, it risks alienating just about everyone. How many blacks and liberals want to fight and die for a nation that, according to critical race theory, is built on slavery and white supremacism?
