“The U.S. Navy is now using an enlisted sailor Drag Queen as a recruiter. I’m done. China is going to destroy us. YOU GOT THIS NAVY. I can’t believe I fought for this bullsh**.” This statement of clear frustration and deep concern was tweeted by Navy SEAL Rob O’Neill in light of news that stunned most everyone—the Navy hiring an active duty yeoman who is also a drag queen with the stage name “Harpy Daniels” to be the face of a new online recruitment effort.
O’Neill is not the only person to be outraged at this news, and it goes beyond Americans being tired of the progressive agenda infiltrating almost every aspect of our politics and culture. This matters especially because it’s not just about an American company going woke to the detriment of sales and stock price; this is about the judgement of our military during a particularly dangerous and unstable time in the world.
The recipient of multiple awards for his service, O’Neill is perhaps best for killing Osama bin Laden during the SEAL Team Six raid on the terrorist’s nest in Pakistan in 2011. Having been on the most front of front lines, he understands that that a woke military puts our nation at risk. And it has nothing to do with drag queens or any other progressive niche—it’s about progressive politics taking precedence over military readiness in a world already on war’s edge.
You see, once you look to serve the woke agenda, that can only be done by serving it exclusively. The point of the new progressive woke cult requires absolute adherence to the absurdity it professes, and nothing else.
O’Neill followed up on twitter noting, “The U.S. Military needs to be ferocious not fabulous.” He then told the Daily Caller, “What the Navy should do is realize they have very brave men and women who are in there and very brave men and women who want to join. When the United States is strong, the world is better. Right now they’re bowing down to less than one percent of people who are looking for likes. Someone, at some point in leadership, needs to say ‘Hold up, something’s wrong here.’ There’s a problem inside and it leads all the way up to politicians,” he told the website. “I’m all about freedom, do whatever you want. That’s why we fight for freedom. But this is not the time for drag ads. It needs to be a Marine fighting a dragon with a sword on fire.”
We know there’s a recruitment crisis and it’s not because we don’t have enough drag queens in the service. NBC reported “the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, found that just 45% of Americans had a great deal of trust and confidence in the military, down 25 points since 2018.” Like everyone else on Earth, potential recruits also watched the catastrophe of the Afghanistan withdrawal unfold resulting in the murder of 13 of our service members. Afghanistan was an embarrassing and deadly debacle revealing Biden and his team for what they are, and told the world US leadership had no idea what it was doing.
On this point, Just the News reminds us, “the U.S. military has abandoned billions of dollars’ worth of arms in a frantic flight from Afghanistan, depleted the nation’s stockpile of Javelins through transfers of the anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, and exacerbated manpower shortages through a draconian COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Yet, even amid erosion in readiness and U.S. global standing, the Biden Pentagon has remained fixated on woke evangelizing, squandering time and resources on equity training, LGBTQ education and racial bias classes for service members — even pushing such training on the children who attend schools run by DOD. The mounting reports of woke inroads into military training and education have elicited increasingly vocal concerns from veterans.”
This obsession with pandering to that far left on every issue is really about an administration that is so lacking in competency, vision, and leadership they’re filling that void with social justice virtue signaling. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, a combat veteran, was equally appalled at the military drag queen ambassador situation expanding on the core of the problem on Fox News, “Young Americans join the military because they want to serve our nation and they’re patriotic and they want to feel comradery and they want excitement and adventure. They join to become warriors. They don’t join to become social justice warriors.”
The Biden administration doesn’t seem to understand or care about that. A 2023 Heritage Foundation survey on the politicization of the military found “68 percent have witnessed some or a significant level of politicization in the military, and 65 percent of those polled say that it is a concern,” and that “Seven in 10 active military members (68 percent) said that politicization would somewhat or significantly affect their decision to encourage their children to join the military.”
Despite these concerns and direct impact on military readiness with a world at war and preparing for more hostilities, The Center for Military Readiness, an independent, non-partisan, public policy organization, reports on several significant woke military policy changes made “incrementally” since Biden took office, including: “Changes official DoD vocabulary to reflect transgender ideology; Allows cross-dressing and other “transitioning” behaviors on-base as well as off-base;” and strangely, “Restricts collection and disclosure of data on ‘incidents of harmful behaviors’ involving sexual orientation and transgender persons.”
As more than a dozen US senators demand answers from Navy Secretary Carolos Del Toro about the drag queen ambassador decision, including information on any compensation paid and data on its effectiveness, it’s safe to say our lunatic enemies of the Chinese Communist Party, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are more inspired than ever, and are laughing at us, not with us.