More often than not, serving in the United States military leaves an indelible mark of pride on the men and women who join that fraternity, yet today many are worried military leaders are more concerned with ideology than they are with developing a lethal force to defend the nation.
Fox News spoke with three such veterans in Phoenix during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, all of whom addressed the four-day event.
“The Pentagon has been infected with wokeism the same way so many other institutions have,” said Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who served as a U.S. Army platoon leader. Hegseth said under the Obama presidency certain generals were chosen “based on their political points of view, not based on their pedigree for killing the enemy” because they would comply with “new priorities.”
That sentiment was shared by former Army Ranger and founder of the Warrior Poet Society, John Lovell. “The military has a very specific and strategic job, and that’s to keep our country safe,” Lovell said. “And when you thrust them in to be the front line of a sociological experiment which has a pernicious ideology that makes people hate the United States, a soldier can very quickly start to despise the very thing he’s supposed to be protecting.”
US AIR FORCE MEMO AUTHORIZES USE OF GENDER PRONOUNS IN SIGNATURE BLOCKS
Earlier this month the Air Force authorized – but did not require – the use of gender pronouns in electronic signature boxes for communications within the department, a move panned by the veterans.
Former Navy SEAL and 3 of 7 founder Chadd Wright reflected on when he joined the military, “It was Don’t ask, Don’t tell. There was none of this stuff,” he said. “It’s a weird environment … I think it is detrimental to mission focus.”
“[On] my Instagram profile, my pronoun is listed as attack helicopter, so you can let everyone know exactly where you are,” said Lovell.
egseth railed against the “upside-down priorities” and said that while in the National Guard – which he only recently left – “the obsession of commands and command groups was compliance with the latest politically correct policy coming out of the Pentagon.”
The trio of troops also slammed military leadership focusing on race rather than building a cohesive force. This past June, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley defended his study of critical race theory before Congress.
“I’ve read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” Milley said. “So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend? And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, non-commissioned officers of being, quote, ‘woke’ or something else, because we’re studying some theories that are out there.”
A week later, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby clarified that the Defense Department does not “espouse or embrace” CRT.
“The military is the most un-racist organization on the face of the Earth,” said Wright. “When you’re serving a team in the Navy, the Army … nobody cares who’s Black, nobody cares who’s White, nobody cares who’s Mexican, nobody cares about any of that. It’s all about the mission, man.”
