September 26, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
With this segment we will have analyzed America’s current status on seven of the eight reasons for the Roman Empire’s decline. The objective is to determine if America is following the same fate. The excerpts certainly indicate we are, which is disturbing and depressing. This segment is no different. There is considerable evidence that the general population is weakening if we were to be attacked, our military is weakening, as is the nation’s police forces. The tragedy of this segment is that it reveals we are the sole cause of the weakening and that in large part is because we are following the dictates of our leadership.
If you concur, then it compels us to take charge and vote the perpetrators out of office. Lack of that action, I am afraid we are destined for the fate of the Roman Empire.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
With this segment we will have analyzed America’s current status on seven of the eight reasons for the Roman Empire’s decline. The objective is to determine if America is following the same fate. The excerpts certainly indicate we are, which is disturbing and depressing. This segment is no different. There is considerable evidence that the general population is weakening if we were to be attacked, our military is weakening, as is the nation’s police forces. The tragedy of this segment is that it reveals we are the sole cause of the weakening and that in large part is because we are following the dictates of our leadership.
If you concur, then it compels us to take charge and vote the perpetrators out of office. Lack of that action, I am afraid we are destined for the fate of the Roman Empire.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING WISDOM FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 12
ROMAN DECLINE #7: THE WEAKENING OF LEGIONS – EXCERPTS
WEAKENING OF THE GENERAL POPULATION
UNDERDOGS versus VICTIMS: The most crucial distinction is that the underdog struggles and overcomes the forces arrayed against them, but the victim’s task is to convince others to overcome adversity for them. The underdog makes a demand of themselves; the victim makes a demand of those around them. The underdog’s hardships are dealt to them by fate, not by other people, and they make it part of their own destiny to overcome those hardships. The victim’s hardships are necessarily created by other people – the evildoers who commit racist acts, the perpetrators who steal elections – who owe them something in return.
An underdog story offers the hope that you can do anything, that no matter your lot in life, our fate is ultimately in your hands, that it is only a question of how hard you work and how long you have to wait for preparation to meet opportunity. In contrast, the victim’s story is all about what they can’t do, the odds are too great, the enemies too strong, the circumstances too unjust for the happy ending to be achieved by the hero’s own power. The underdog’s task is to overcome others’ doubt by proving them wrong about what they can do. But the victim’s task is to overcome their doubt by persuading them to recognize them as a victim.
The underdog’s journey is hard: that’s what defines it. It’s even more daunting set against the backdrop of a long history of people who have made the same journey successfully. That’s the historical backdrop of our merit-based culture, one that places a lot of pressure on people today – pressure that the original underdogs in our nation didn’t have to face. The high risk of failure in an established merit-bases culture provides a powerful incentive for people to take the easier path – say, victimhood – whenever it’s available. Logically, we could resolve that problem either by closing off victimhood as a path to success or by moving away from our merit-based culture. We’re moving toward the latter.
The Union can only stay intact this time, and perhaps should only stay intact, if Americans come to see themselves as fellow citizens rather than each other’s victims. Otherwise, we will continue to be locked in endless cultural and legal warfare, like the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s, always avenging the last generation’s grievances, fighting to control the future but never looking forward to it. How could we? We’ve already had one civil war, and we’re still fighting it.
Victimhood has become so entrenched in American culture that it even determines the way we talk to each other and the things we can say. When we Americans do talk to each other, victimhood increasingly determines what we’re allowed to say. We all know there’s a new category of things you just can’t say. That’s even what we call them. What we mean by this label is that you just can’t say some ideas no matter how much evidence you provide for them or how politely you state your position. You can’t share some opinions no matter how well you warrant their truth, because the reasons you can’t share them have nothing to do with whether they’re true or not. Even the reason we can’t say some things – that they oppose favored progressive victimhood narratives – is something you just can’t say, which is why this category is presented as a primitive, a fundamental fact with no further justification.
When everyone embraces the ideology of victimhood, we’re gradually led to mutually assured destruction – not the theory, but the destruction itself. The logic of victimhood draws us into our mutual demise slowly but surely, like the grip of a black hole, each step toward ruin seeming rational and necessary as we take it. The fact that the path to destruction is gradual rather than sudden is what makes it possible to actually get there. America is trapped, locked in a grievance-fueled race to the bottom propelled by two major forces: cyclical control of the political levers of power and unrestrained backlash to the entrenched cultural ones. The only way to break free of this vicious cycle is to find a way to forgive each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim. Otherwise, all we’ll be able to do is walk proudly toward our bitter end as it finally comes into view.
Source: Nation of Victims by Vivek Ramaswamy (2022)
WEAKENING OF OUR MILITARY POWER
We are losing our military technological edge. China has modernized with the intent to defeat U.S. forces, developing an unmatched missile arsenal, advanced aircraft, and combat ships and investing in high-end cyber and anti-satellite capabilities and lethal drones. Meanwhile, two decades of war, continual underfunding, bureaucratic impediments, and cultural drift all inhibited much-needed innovation in the U.S. military, and the armed forces have readiness and personnel crises on their hands. The services struggle to give their people the training and working equipment needed to perform their mission. Each is falling short of its recruiting goals, and radical, progressive politics are making their way into the leadership and education of our war fighters, distracting from the common purpose and missions that should define service. A former Pentagon war planner summarized the situation succinctly in 2019; in war games, “when we fight China or Russia … We lose a lot of people; we lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective.” That is, we have lost military primacy.
The humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and our failure to deter Vladimir Putin’s aggression signaled to many that America was in retreat. Moreover, China has sought to dominate the next generation of diplomacy, forging new relationships and shaping the rules of the road for emerging technologies. It need not be this way. These outcomes are the result of choices, and it is past time to make different choices that renew America.
Source: Superpower in Peril by David H. McCormick (2023)
US military power was weaker this year than the year prior, according to a new report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that each year analyzes the strength of the armed forces and the threat to America. The report rated America’s military power as “weak” down from “marginal” in the previous year’s index.
A Force In Decline: The report also offered an assessment of U.S. military power among the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Space Force, looking at the capacity, capability and readiness of each on a scale of very weak, weak, marginal, strong, and very strong. Only the Marine Corps ranked “strong” overall.
The Army scored “marginal,” while the Air Force was ranked “very weak” and the Navy “weak.” The report backed calls for a naval force armed with 400 manned ships to meet its missions but said the service’s fleet of 298 ships cannot keep up with an “intensified operational tempo.” “Contributing to a lower assessment is the Navy’s persistent inability to arrest and reverse the continued diminution of its fleet while adversary forces grow in number and capability.”
The Air Force’s main issues are related to pilot training and retention as well as its aging aircraft fleet, the report said. The think tank suggested the service could win in a single major regional contingency but would struggle against a “peer competitor.” “The shortage of pilots and flying time for those pilots degrades the ability of the Air Force to generate the quality of combat power that would be needed to meet wartime requirements,” the report noted. The newest service, the Space Force, also was labeled “weak,” the report citing “slow and incremental” efforts to modernize aging platforms.
Source: Defense News: US military in decline, threats from China ‘formidable,’ report says by Zamone Perez 10/18/2022
THE WEAKENING OF THE MILITARY FORCES
Complaints by veteran soldiers about younger generations who lack discipline and traditional values are as old as war itself. Grizzled veterans in the Greek phalanx, Roman legions, and Napoleon’s elite corps all believed that the failings of the young would be the ruin of their armies. This is not the chief worry of grizzled American veterans today. The largest threat they see by far to our current military is the weakening of its fabric by radical progressive (or “woke”) policies being imposed, not by a rising generations of slackers, but by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness. Wokeness in the military is being imposed by elected and appointed leaders in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon who have little understanding of the purpose, character, traditions, and requirements of the institution they are trying to change. Unless the policies that flow from it are illegal or directly jeopardize readiness, senior military leaders have little alternative but to comply.
Woke ideology undermines military readiness in various ways. It undermines cohesiveness by emphasizing differences based on race, ethnicity, and sex. It undermines leadership authority by introducing questions about whether promotion is based on merit or quota requirements. It leads to military personnel serving in specialties and areas for which they are not qualified or ready. And it takes time and resources away from training activities and weapons development that contribute to readiness. Weakness in the military also affects relations between the military and society at large. It acts as a disincentive for many young Americans in terms of enlistment. And it undermines wholehearted support for the military by a significant portion of the American public at a time when it is needed the most. Physical fitness has long been a hallmark of the U.S. military. But in recent years, fitness standards have been progressively watered down in pursuit of the woke goal of “leveling the playing field.”
President Biden signed an executive order in 2021 requiring all organizations in the military – as well as in the rest of the federal government – to create Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices, to produce strategic DEI plans, and to create bureaucratic structures to report on progress towards DEI goals. The overall goal, Biden said, was “advancing equity for all” – again using the Left’s euphemism for achieving desired outcomes through discrimination policies. Biden signed another executive order imposing a massive regime of environmental goals and requirements for the Department of Defense. These goals included transitional to all electric non-tactical vehicles by 2035, carbon-free electricity for military installations by that same year, and net zero emission from those installations by 2050. As a result, the Pentagon recently announced it will devote over $3 billion of its already stretched-thin military budget to climate-related initiatives in 2023 alone.
Spending billions on woke programs and climate change while the Chinese are outpacing us on hypersonic weapons, quantum computing, and other important military technologies is one piece of evidence. Recent reports showing the military’s dismal failure to gain new recruits in adequate numbers is another. Is anyone surprised that potential recruits – many of whom come from rural or poor areas of the country – don’t want to spend their time being lectured about white privilege? Most Americans are still proud and trusting of our military. But this trust and support cannot be taken for granted. If Americans perceive that the military is being exploited for political purposes or being used for experiments in woke social policies, that support will evaporate, and the consequences will be dire.
Source: Imprimis: The Rise of Wokeness in the Military by Thomas Spoehr (June/July 2022)
CONCLUSION: We are watching in real time America’s institutions being gutted on behalf of left-wing politics. Our military is designed to deter and to defend, to kill people and break things. If diversity facilitates that mission, that’s wonderful. But to supplant the military’s chief mission with the woke protocols of the political left is to undermine that chief mission. The world is a dangerous, ugly, competitive place. If our masturbatory woke solipsism blinds us to that reality, the cost will be quite real.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
THE WEAKENING OF THE NATION’S POLICE FORCES
Assessment in 2017 by Heather MacDonald: Triggered by a series of highly publicized deaths of black males at the hands of the police, the Black Lives Matter movement holds that police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today. That belief has spawned riots, “die-ins,” and the assassination of police officers. The movement’s targets include Broken Windows policing and the practice of stopping and questioning suspicious individuals, both of which are said to harass blacks. President Obama charged that the criminal justice system treats blacks different than whites. If the Black Lives Matter movement was correct, this falloff in discretionary policing should have been a boon to black lives. Instead, a bloodbath ensued, and its victims were virtually all black. When the cops back off, blacks pay the greatest price. The truth would have come as no surprise to the legions of inner-city residents who fervently support the police and whose voices are almost never heard in the media.
Background: In the summer of 2014, a lie overtook significant parts of the country and grew into a kind of mass hysteria. The highest reaches of American society promulgated those untruths and participated in the mass hysteria. President Barack Obama, speaking after a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, declared that blacks were right to believe that the criminal-justice systems was often stacked against them. Obama repeated that message as he traveled around the country subsequently. Eric Holder escalated a long-running theme of his tenure as U.S. attorney general: that the police routinely engaged in racial profiling and needed federal intervention to police properly.
A new nationwide crime wave took place in 2015. The most plausible explanation for the surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments that began in the summer of 2014. Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now stirs up angry protests. Not only are police officers at risk of violent attack in these situations, but acquittals of officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically characterized as a miscarriage of justice.
The Washington Post found press documentation of 258 black victims of fatal police shootings in 2015, most of whom were seriously attacking the officer. In 2014, the most recent year for which such data are available, there were 6,095 black homicide victims in the United States. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other blacks – who are responsible for a death risk ten times that of whites in urban areas. The Post also documented 991 victims of fatal police shootings. Whites were 50% of those victims and blacks were 25%. Blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of all murders, and 45% of all assaults in the 75 largest counties while constituting 15% of the population in those counties. Given the racially lopsided nature of gun violence, a 25% rate of black victimization by the police is not evidence of bias.
The campaign against the cops is a battle in a larger culture war, in which one camp seeks to redefine the American experience as the continual oppression of an every-growing number of victim groups. Resistance to lawful police action is becoming routine. Officers are reluctant to engage, given the nonstop campaign against them. Homicides in the 50 largest U.S. cities were up nearly 17% in 2015 over the previous year. Liberal elites have successfully kept attention focused exclusively on phantom police and criminal justice racism while squelching even the most tentative discussion of the crime-breeding chaos of inner-city underclass culture. We are playing with fire.
Source: The War on Cops by Heather MacDonald (2017).
Assessment by Senator Tom Cotton July, 2021: Last year, the United States experienced the largest single year increase in murder on record and the most drug-overdose deaths in our nation’s history. Murder nationwide rose by an astonishing 25%, aggravated assaults increased in 56 of the 66 largest American cities, and 88,000 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses. The murder rate has now reached the highest level since the mid-1990s.
Racial, left-wing prosecutors, many with campaigns funded by George Soros, won elections in major American and adopted radical criminal-leniency policies. In cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, district attorneys began refusing to prosecute laws against shoplifting, vagrancy, and entire categories of misdemeanors.
Leading Democrats called to “defund the police,” and at least 20 major cities agreed, slashing their police departments to the tune of $840 million. New York City alone shifted nearly $1 billion from the NYPSD, and Los Angeles cut funding to its police department by $150 million. The radicals didn’t stop at defunding the police; they also defamed, demoralized, and disarmed our men and women in blue.
It’s no surprise that in such a toxic environment, police retirements surged 15% in Chicago, 37% in Las Vegas, and 72% in New York City. And recruiting is just as bad. As officers around the country ask me, “Who would want to be police in today’s environment.” This concerted nationwide attack on police is nothing less than the gravest assault on the rule of law in modern times. The simple fact is that today’s Democrat party is pro-riot, anti-cop, and anti-prosecutor. They are ignoring an obvious truth: if you stop enforcing the law, you will catch fewer criminals, and they will commit more and usually worse crimes.
From our city halls to the halls of Congress, our leaders need to get on the same page as our people. It’s time to get tough on crime again. If we did not have a border crisis, we would not have a drug crisis. The majority of meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl comes across the southern border. This year alone, the Border Patrol seized enough deadly doses of fentanyl to kill every single American several times over. An “open border” is a death sentence for thousands of Americans.
Policing is one of the greatest civil rights issues of our time. Weak policing, weak prosecuting, and weak sentencing hurts blacks more than any other group of American citizens. African Americans tragically constitute approximately half of all murder victims and regularly suffer the brunt of damage resulting from riots. The fair-weather protesters, who so fondly decry systemic racism, fail to see a cruel irony. If, as they claim, racist policy is defined solely by racially disparate outcomes, then their weak-on-crime proposals are in fact breathtakingly racist. When it comes to the morality of the rule of law, we should never take lectures from those who coddle criminals.
Source: Transcribed address to the National Press Club by Senator Tom Cotton (6/25/2023).
Defund the Police? The narrative is that police are brutal and violent, and that the community should be in charge of policing themselves. However, statistics clearly show that many communities, especially in major cities, are exponentially more violent and brutal than the police. Yet, we want to hand the powers of enforcing laws over to these communities because they will be so kind and just.
A 2018 John Hopkins University Study found that at least 250,000 to as high as 440,000 people per year, just in the U.S. die from medical errors. Accidents. So, human error is leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths a year in the medical field. No one bats an eye. There are no riots. No outcry. No plan to “defund.” Yet, we place irrationally higher standards on law enforcement who have less than 1,000 shootings per year.
In sum, many sociologists essentially want to take the third most populated country on the planet and treat its citizens as lab rats. Try something that has never been done in a developed country. Remove the police force.
Source: Defund the Police by Jasper Castro (2020).
Assessment by Police Chief Joel F. Shults, PhD. December 2022: Police 1 gave officers a voice by asking the question “What has been the biggest challenge for Law Enforcement Officers in 2022.” Here in order is the list:
Recruitment and Retention: The number one concern expressed by 52% of respondents was recruitment and retention. This result was higher than last year’s ranking of the issue that, while still at number one, was at 37% for 2021. If the news on the increase in violent crime wasn’t a constant companion headline, police staffing might not be such an urgent issue, but inadequate staffing affects them most directly. Reports of excessive overtime and fatigue, increased response time, cutting short investigating services, rushing rookies into the field and wondering if there is going to be a backup available are all on the minds of officers. The cycle of short-staffed working conditions, along with the pervasive hostility to law enforcement, have caused more rethinking about retirement and career changes than ever.
Risk of Prosecution for On-Duty Actions: Taking over the number 2 ranking for 2022’s biggest challenge at 17% is the risk of prosecution for on-duty actions. In a rush to prove that officers don’t always get away with misconduct, prosecutors – particularly those elected on a reform platform during the height of the ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) frenzy are charging officers with assault, attempted murder, and murder for circumstances that often seem to be debatable and arguable using the science of biology and physics.
Source: Police1.com by Joel Shultz, PhD, founder of the National Center for Police Advocacy and former Chief of Police in Colorado (12/15/2022).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
ROMAN DECLINE #7: THE WEAKENING OF LEGIONS – EXCERPTS
WEAKENING OF THE GENERAL POPULATION
UNDERDOGS versus VICTIMS: The most crucial distinction is that the underdog struggles and overcomes the forces arrayed against them, but the victim’s task is to convince others to overcome adversity for them. The underdog makes a demand of themselves; the victim makes a demand of those around them. The underdog’s hardships are dealt to them by fate, not by other people, and they make it part of their own destiny to overcome those hardships. The victim’s hardships are necessarily created by other people – the evildoers who commit racist acts, the perpetrators who steal elections – who owe them something in return.
An underdog story offers the hope that you can do anything, that no matter your lot in life, our fate is ultimately in your hands, that it is only a question of how hard you work and how long you have to wait for preparation to meet opportunity. In contrast, the victim’s story is all about what they can’t do, the odds are too great, the enemies too strong, the circumstances too unjust for the happy ending to be achieved by the hero’s own power. The underdog’s task is to overcome others’ doubt by proving them wrong about what they can do. But the victim’s task is to overcome their doubt by persuading them to recognize them as a victim.
The underdog’s journey is hard: that’s what defines it. It’s even more daunting set against the backdrop of a long history of people who have made the same journey successfully. That’s the historical backdrop of our merit-based culture, one that places a lot of pressure on people today – pressure that the original underdogs in our nation didn’t have to face. The high risk of failure in an established merit-bases culture provides a powerful incentive for people to take the easier path – say, victimhood – whenever it’s available. Logically, we could resolve that problem either by closing off victimhood as a path to success or by moving away from our merit-based culture. We’re moving toward the latter.
The Union can only stay intact this time, and perhaps should only stay intact, if Americans come to see themselves as fellow citizens rather than each other’s victims. Otherwise, we will continue to be locked in endless cultural and legal warfare, like the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s, always avenging the last generation’s grievances, fighting to control the future but never looking forward to it. How could we? We’ve already had one civil war, and we’re still fighting it.
Victimhood has become so entrenched in American culture that it even determines the way we talk to each other and the things we can say. When we Americans do talk to each other, victimhood increasingly determines what we’re allowed to say. We all know there’s a new category of things you just can’t say. That’s even what we call them. What we mean by this label is that you just can’t say some ideas no matter how much evidence you provide for them or how politely you state your position. You can’t share some opinions no matter how well you warrant their truth, because the reasons you can’t share them have nothing to do with whether they’re true or not. Even the reason we can’t say some things – that they oppose favored progressive victimhood narratives – is something you just can’t say, which is why this category is presented as a primitive, a fundamental fact with no further justification.
When everyone embraces the ideology of victimhood, we’re gradually led to mutually assured destruction – not the theory, but the destruction itself. The logic of victimhood draws us into our mutual demise slowly but surely, like the grip of a black hole, each step toward ruin seeming rational and necessary as we take it. The fact that the path to destruction is gradual rather than sudden is what makes it possible to actually get there. America is trapped, locked in a grievance-fueled race to the bottom propelled by two major forces: cyclical control of the political levers of power and unrestrained backlash to the entrenched cultural ones. The only way to break free of this vicious cycle is to find a way to forgive each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim. Otherwise, all we’ll be able to do is walk proudly toward our bitter end as it finally comes into view.
Source: Nation of Victims by Vivek Ramaswamy (2022)
WEAKENING OF OUR MILITARY POWER
We are losing our military technological edge. China has modernized with the intent to defeat U.S. forces, developing an unmatched missile arsenal, advanced aircraft, and combat ships and investing in high-end cyber and anti-satellite capabilities and lethal drones. Meanwhile, two decades of war, continual underfunding, bureaucratic impediments, and cultural drift all inhibited much-needed innovation in the U.S. military, and the armed forces have readiness and personnel crises on their hands. The services struggle to give their people the training and working equipment needed to perform their mission. Each is falling short of its recruiting goals, and radical, progressive politics are making their way into the leadership and education of our war fighters, distracting from the common purpose and missions that should define service. A former Pentagon war planner summarized the situation succinctly in 2019; in war games, “when we fight China or Russia … We lose a lot of people; we lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective.” That is, we have lost military primacy.
The humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and our failure to deter Vladimir Putin’s aggression signaled to many that America was in retreat. Moreover, China has sought to dominate the next generation of diplomacy, forging new relationships and shaping the rules of the road for emerging technologies. It need not be this way. These outcomes are the result of choices, and it is past time to make different choices that renew America.
Source: Superpower in Peril by David H. McCormick (2023)
US military power was weaker this year than the year prior, according to a new report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that each year analyzes the strength of the armed forces and the threat to America. The report rated America’s military power as “weak” down from “marginal” in the previous year’s index.
A Force In Decline: The report also offered an assessment of U.S. military power among the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Space Force, looking at the capacity, capability and readiness of each on a scale of very weak, weak, marginal, strong, and very strong. Only the Marine Corps ranked “strong” overall.
The Army scored “marginal,” while the Air Force was ranked “very weak” and the Navy “weak.” The report backed calls for a naval force armed with 400 manned ships to meet its missions but said the service’s fleet of 298 ships cannot keep up with an “intensified operational tempo.” “Contributing to a lower assessment is the Navy’s persistent inability to arrest and reverse the continued diminution of its fleet while adversary forces grow in number and capability.”
The Air Force’s main issues are related to pilot training and retention as well as its aging aircraft fleet, the report said. The think tank suggested the service could win in a single major regional contingency but would struggle against a “peer competitor.” “The shortage of pilots and flying time for those pilots degrades the ability of the Air Force to generate the quality of combat power that would be needed to meet wartime requirements,” the report noted. The newest service, the Space Force, also was labeled “weak,” the report citing “slow and incremental” efforts to modernize aging platforms.
Source: Defense News: US military in decline, threats from China ‘formidable,’ report says by Zamone Perez 10/18/2022
THE WEAKENING OF THE MILITARY FORCES
Complaints by veteran soldiers about younger generations who lack discipline and traditional values are as old as war itself. Grizzled veterans in the Greek phalanx, Roman legions, and Napoleon’s elite corps all believed that the failings of the young would be the ruin of their armies. This is not the chief worry of grizzled American veterans today. The largest threat they see by far to our current military is the weakening of its fabric by radical progressive (or “woke”) policies being imposed, not by a rising generations of slackers, but by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness. Wokeness in the military is being imposed by elected and appointed leaders in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon who have little understanding of the purpose, character, traditions, and requirements of the institution they are trying to change. Unless the policies that flow from it are illegal or directly jeopardize readiness, senior military leaders have little alternative but to comply.
Woke ideology undermines military readiness in various ways. It undermines cohesiveness by emphasizing differences based on race, ethnicity, and sex. It undermines leadership authority by introducing questions about whether promotion is based on merit or quota requirements. It leads to military personnel serving in specialties and areas for which they are not qualified or ready. And it takes time and resources away from training activities and weapons development that contribute to readiness. Weakness in the military also affects relations between the military and society at large. It acts as a disincentive for many young Americans in terms of enlistment. And it undermines wholehearted support for the military by a significant portion of the American public at a time when it is needed the most. Physical fitness has long been a hallmark of the U.S. military. But in recent years, fitness standards have been progressively watered down in pursuit of the woke goal of “leveling the playing field.”
President Biden signed an executive order in 2021 requiring all organizations in the military – as well as in the rest of the federal government – to create Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices, to produce strategic DEI plans, and to create bureaucratic structures to report on progress towards DEI goals. The overall goal, Biden said, was “advancing equity for all” – again using the Left’s euphemism for achieving desired outcomes through discrimination policies. Biden signed another executive order imposing a massive regime of environmental goals and requirements for the Department of Defense. These goals included transitional to all electric non-tactical vehicles by 2035, carbon-free electricity for military installations by that same year, and net zero emission from those installations by 2050. As a result, the Pentagon recently announced it will devote over $3 billion of its already stretched-thin military budget to climate-related initiatives in 2023 alone.
Spending billions on woke programs and climate change while the Chinese are outpacing us on hypersonic weapons, quantum computing, and other important military technologies is one piece of evidence. Recent reports showing the military’s dismal failure to gain new recruits in adequate numbers is another. Is anyone surprised that potential recruits – many of whom come from rural or poor areas of the country – don’t want to spend their time being lectured about white privilege? Most Americans are still proud and trusting of our military. But this trust and support cannot be taken for granted. If Americans perceive that the military is being exploited for political purposes or being used for experiments in woke social policies, that support will evaporate, and the consequences will be dire.
Source: Imprimis: The Rise of Wokeness in the Military by Thomas Spoehr (June/July 2022)
CONCLUSION: We are watching in real time America’s institutions being gutted on behalf of left-wing politics. Our military is designed to deter and to defend, to kill people and break things. If diversity facilitates that mission, that’s wonderful. But to supplant the military’s chief mission with the woke protocols of the political left is to undermine that chief mission. The world is a dangerous, ugly, competitive place. If our masturbatory woke solipsism blinds us to that reality, the cost will be quite real.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022)
THE WEAKENING OF THE NATION’S POLICE FORCES
Assessment in 2017 by Heather MacDonald: Triggered by a series of highly publicized deaths of black males at the hands of the police, the Black Lives Matter movement holds that police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today. That belief has spawned riots, “die-ins,” and the assassination of police officers. The movement’s targets include Broken Windows policing and the practice of stopping and questioning suspicious individuals, both of which are said to harass blacks. President Obama charged that the criminal justice system treats blacks different than whites. If the Black Lives Matter movement was correct, this falloff in discretionary policing should have been a boon to black lives. Instead, a bloodbath ensued, and its victims were virtually all black. When the cops back off, blacks pay the greatest price. The truth would have come as no surprise to the legions of inner-city residents who fervently support the police and whose voices are almost never heard in the media.
Background: In the summer of 2014, a lie overtook significant parts of the country and grew into a kind of mass hysteria. The highest reaches of American society promulgated those untruths and participated in the mass hysteria. President Barack Obama, speaking after a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, declared that blacks were right to believe that the criminal-justice systems was often stacked against them. Obama repeated that message as he traveled around the country subsequently. Eric Holder escalated a long-running theme of his tenure as U.S. attorney general: that the police routinely engaged in racial profiling and needed federal intervention to police properly.
A new nationwide crime wave took place in 2015. The most plausible explanation for the surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments that began in the summer of 2014. Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now stirs up angry protests. Not only are police officers at risk of violent attack in these situations, but acquittals of officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically characterized as a miscarriage of justice.
The Washington Post found press documentation of 258 black victims of fatal police shootings in 2015, most of whom were seriously attacking the officer. In 2014, the most recent year for which such data are available, there were 6,095 black homicide victims in the United States. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other blacks – who are responsible for a death risk ten times that of whites in urban areas. The Post also documented 991 victims of fatal police shootings. Whites were 50% of those victims and blacks were 25%. Blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of all murders, and 45% of all assaults in the 75 largest counties while constituting 15% of the population in those counties. Given the racially lopsided nature of gun violence, a 25% rate of black victimization by the police is not evidence of bias.
The campaign against the cops is a battle in a larger culture war, in which one camp seeks to redefine the American experience as the continual oppression of an every-growing number of victim groups. Resistance to lawful police action is becoming routine. Officers are reluctant to engage, given the nonstop campaign against them. Homicides in the 50 largest U.S. cities were up nearly 17% in 2015 over the previous year. Liberal elites have successfully kept attention focused exclusively on phantom police and criminal justice racism while squelching even the most tentative discussion of the crime-breeding chaos of inner-city underclass culture. We are playing with fire.
Source: The War on Cops by Heather MacDonald (2017).
Assessment by Senator Tom Cotton July, 2021: Last year, the United States experienced the largest single year increase in murder on record and the most drug-overdose deaths in our nation’s history. Murder nationwide rose by an astonishing 25%, aggravated assaults increased in 56 of the 66 largest American cities, and 88,000 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses. The murder rate has now reached the highest level since the mid-1990s.
Racial, left-wing prosecutors, many with campaigns funded by George Soros, won elections in major American and adopted radical criminal-leniency policies. In cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, district attorneys began refusing to prosecute laws against shoplifting, vagrancy, and entire categories of misdemeanors.
Leading Democrats called to “defund the police,” and at least 20 major cities agreed, slashing their police departments to the tune of $840 million. New York City alone shifted nearly $1 billion from the NYPSD, and Los Angeles cut funding to its police department by $150 million. The radicals didn’t stop at defunding the police; they also defamed, demoralized, and disarmed our men and women in blue.
It’s no surprise that in such a toxic environment, police retirements surged 15% in Chicago, 37% in Las Vegas, and 72% in New York City. And recruiting is just as bad. As officers around the country ask me, “Who would want to be police in today’s environment.” This concerted nationwide attack on police is nothing less than the gravest assault on the rule of law in modern times. The simple fact is that today’s Democrat party is pro-riot, anti-cop, and anti-prosecutor. They are ignoring an obvious truth: if you stop enforcing the law, you will catch fewer criminals, and they will commit more and usually worse crimes.
From our city halls to the halls of Congress, our leaders need to get on the same page as our people. It’s time to get tough on crime again. If we did not have a border crisis, we would not have a drug crisis. The majority of meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl comes across the southern border. This year alone, the Border Patrol seized enough deadly doses of fentanyl to kill every single American several times over. An “open border” is a death sentence for thousands of Americans.
Policing is one of the greatest civil rights issues of our time. Weak policing, weak prosecuting, and weak sentencing hurts blacks more than any other group of American citizens. African Americans tragically constitute approximately half of all murder victims and regularly suffer the brunt of damage resulting from riots. The fair-weather protesters, who so fondly decry systemic racism, fail to see a cruel irony. If, as they claim, racist policy is defined solely by racially disparate outcomes, then their weak-on-crime proposals are in fact breathtakingly racist. When it comes to the morality of the rule of law, we should never take lectures from those who coddle criminals.
Source: Transcribed address to the National Press Club by Senator Tom Cotton (6/25/2023).
Defund the Police? The narrative is that police are brutal and violent, and that the community should be in charge of policing themselves. However, statistics clearly show that many communities, especially in major cities, are exponentially more violent and brutal than the police. Yet, we want to hand the powers of enforcing laws over to these communities because they will be so kind and just.
A 2018 John Hopkins University Study found that at least 250,000 to as high as 440,000 people per year, just in the U.S. die from medical errors. Accidents. So, human error is leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths a year in the medical field. No one bats an eye. There are no riots. No outcry. No plan to “defund.” Yet, we place irrationally higher standards on law enforcement who have less than 1,000 shootings per year.
In sum, many sociologists essentially want to take the third most populated country on the planet and treat its citizens as lab rats. Try something that has never been done in a developed country. Remove the police force.
Source: Defund the Police by Jasper Castro (2020).
Assessment by Police Chief Joel F. Shults, PhD. December 2022: Police 1 gave officers a voice by asking the question “What has been the biggest challenge for Law Enforcement Officers in 2022.” Here in order is the list:
Recruitment and Retention: The number one concern expressed by 52% of respondents was recruitment and retention. This result was higher than last year’s ranking of the issue that, while still at number one, was at 37% for 2021. If the news on the increase in violent crime wasn’t a constant companion headline, police staffing might not be such an urgent issue, but inadequate staffing affects them most directly. Reports of excessive overtime and fatigue, increased response time, cutting short investigating services, rushing rookies into the field and wondering if there is going to be a backup available are all on the minds of officers. The cycle of short-staffed working conditions, along with the pervasive hostility to law enforcement, have caused more rethinking about retirement and career changes than ever.
Risk of Prosecution for On-Duty Actions: Taking over the number 2 ranking for 2022’s biggest challenge at 17% is the risk of prosecution for on-duty actions. In a rush to prove that officers don’t always get away with misconduct, prosecutors – particularly those elected on a reform platform during the height of the ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) frenzy are charging officers with assault, attempted murder, and murder for circumstances that often seem to be debatable and arguable using the science of biology and physics.
Source: Police1.com by Joel Shultz, PhD, founder of the National Center for Police Advocacy and former Chief of Police in Colorado (12/15/2022).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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