The tweet lands like a punch to the gut, not because of its crudeness but because of its accuracy. We’re so fucking screwed. That’s the takeaway from watching our national security institutions transform themselves into diversity recruitment vehicles while the world burns.
Let me be absolutely clear about my point, because I know how easy it is to be misunderstood on this subject. One’s sexuality should not matter. One’s skin color should not matter. What matters is whether the man or woman loves America and is willing to protect and defend the Constitution. Period. Full stop.
I’ve served alongside men of every background imaginable. I’ve trusted my life to people whose skin color and sexual orientation I never thought to ask about. In the field, in the shit, none of that matters. What matters is competence, courage, and commitment.
But that is not what these recruitment campaigns are about.
The CIA and the Army are now producing propaganda that elevates sexuality as a selling point. Not competence. Not patriotism. Not the willingness to do hard things in hard places. Sexuality. They’re telling potential recruits: come be gay with us. Come be part of our diverse family. Come check the boxes that make us look like the corporate diversity brochure we’ve decided to become.
This is insanity.
The people running these campaigns have decided that the way to attract talent is to emphasize the most irrelevant aspects of human identity. They’re actively seeking out what they consider “normal” while treating the traditional backbone of the military and intelligence communities as suspect. If you’re a white male from a two-parent heterosexual family who attended church, you’re now classified as a potential extremist. You’re a problem to be managed, not an asset to be developed.
I’ve seen this movie before. It ends badly.
The organizations that defend this country were built by people who shared a common commitment to something larger than themselves. They didn’t need to be recruited based on their identities. They showed up because they believed in America, because they wanted to serve, because they understood that freedom isn’t free and someone has to pay the price.
Now we’re telling them: your identity is the problem. Your background is suspect. Your traditional values are dangerous. But hey, come join us anyway, and while you’re here, celebrate the weird and disturbed and dysfunctional people we’re promoting as the new normal.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not ignoring the shortcomings of the straight white guys who came before. John Brennan and James Clapper come immediately to mind—men who held the highest positions and dishonored themselves and their institutions through politicization and incompetence. They are not models. They are warnings.
But the answer to bad straight white guys is not to replace them with bad gay guys or bad trans guys or bad anyone-else guys. The answer is to recruit the best people, regardless of identity, and train them to be better than we were.
That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is a wholesale transformation of our national security apparatus into a social experiment. We’re more concerned with how our recruitment ads look than with whether our intelligence officers can recruit assets in denied areas. We’re more focused on diversity metrics than on whether our military can win the next war.
The Russians and Chinese watch this and laugh. They don’t have these debates. They don’t worry about whether their recruitment propaganda is inclusive enough. They worry about power. They worry about capability. They worry about beating us when the shooting starts.
And we’re worried about making sure our CIA recruitment video has enough gay people in it.
We’re so fucking screwed.
