America's Talking - Senator Marco Rubio: ‘Woke Activists’ Are Hollowing Out Our Military

Episode Date: April 1, 2023

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio blasted the Pentagon’s increasingly leftward bent as it struggles to keep up with national security interests. “The United States military is the greatest fighting force in the world, but woke activists in the Biden Administration are undermining military readiness, cohesion, and purpose,” Rubio, R-Fla., told The Center Square. “We cannot allow these left-wing crazies to hollow out our military. The world is an increasingly dangerous place and America’s security requires a strong military capable of deterring – and if need be, defending – our nation.” Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. We are recording this on Friday, March 31st. Man, the first quarter of 2023 is almost up. Hard to believe, huh? Wow, it's going by fast, and probably because the news cycle is moving so fast. Well, let's talk about some of that news cycle, Casey. You had a couple interesting stories that you reported on for the Center Square. Every story is an interesting story, Dan. A couple of interesting. Anyway, continue. Good point, Casey.

Yes, thank you. You reported on what's been going on at the Pentagon under the Biden administration. Of course, there's a war in Ukraine that the U.S. has sent hundreds of millions of dollars, to in both cash and equipment. Some are concerned that it's depleting military supplies. But at the same time, the Pentagon, the military has been pushing certain what many critics call leftist ideals onto the military, spending money on that, resources on that. Tell us about your stories this week. Yeah, this is an interesting nexus of a few issues. The war in Ukraine, the kind of the

military's ability, Pentagon's ability to respond to shortages and crises. And yes, this kind of more politicized side of what's happening at the Pentagon, which has a lot of angles, but we've been writing about this for a while. You know, there's military schools that educate the families of service members, right? And they've become increasingly to use the terms, quote unquote, woke. And that is, that was exposed last year when one of the, you know, the leaders of the diversity, equity, and inclusion for those schools was exposed. She had several very controversial books, books about white privilege and basically a string of tweets where she just attacked white people outright and quote unquote white folks and Karen's and talked

about the audacity, which is like the audacity of Caucasians. And so she had this string of really racist tweets and controversial books that were all, and her books were in the school libraries, right? And so there was also the question of, hey, is it a, I don't know, conflict of interest? Is it legal to do that? If Biden wrote a book and then he mandated that it be in every public library, I mean, could that. So his book sales go up, isn't that kind of questionable? So there's several things going on with this story. But it really, this individual involved was just one of several angles to the increasing kind of critical race theory and also gender ideology in few into the Pentagon. So this has become increasingly controversial, and we really broke down and

uncovered a lot of it at the CenterSquare.com earlier this week, went into some of the things that are happening, like West Point cadets being lectured on their privilege. We talked about, you know, the DEI for these department for these schools, doing different things. And we got, you know, Senator Marco Rubio to comment on it. He responded to our reporting. And, you know, the way he put it is, I'll read his direct quote, but he said, woke activists are hollowing out our military. And so all this Leftward Bent really coincides at the same time with reporting showing that we're actually not able to fulfill some of the needs that we have for this war in Ukraine. And we're running out of certain things like Stinger missiles. And the Ukraine war has really exposed that actually we're not doing a good job as we thought we could in manufacturing quickly large supplies of ammunition, of things like ball bearings to fuel a war effort.

And so, of course, that's really concerning on its own. When you put into, when you intersect that with the intersectionality that's taken over the Pentagon, and it's a lot of critics just saying, hey, we've lost our focus. How can we be focusing on, you know, gender and critical race theory when we can't even get stinger missiles to Ukraine? That seems to be a national security issue. When Senator Rubio spoke with you, I mean, does he have those concerns? Yeah, he definitely does. I mean, that's what it is.

It's national security interest. And in that space, especially in Congress, there's a lot of discussion about readiness. a readiness, military readiness. And it's definitely true that organizations can become distracted. Keeping all these bases equipped, trained, staff is a huge logistical undertaking. And of course, it's very expensive. I mean, and that's something we hear a lot about, how expensive our military is. Of course, we spend more money on a military than all other nations, top 20 nations combined.

But now more and more that money is going is being diverted to kind of this critical race theory stuff. And it's kind of scary in a way because it's good that we found out when fighting Ukraine that we can't create enough missiles fast enough? What if we had waited until we were at war with China to find out that we can't create enough stinger missiles? I mean, I don't, I'm not hearing a lot of answers. It also comes. I'll hand over you down after this, but this week has really been when the Pentagon has been discussing with Congress, the budget and how much money they need for different things. So this is all kind of coming together at an interesting time. You referenced China. The Chinese president visited Russia last week. So there's there certainly is an alliance between Russia and China,

probably our two biggest adversaries and threats to our national security. So it would seem that the military needs to get its act together here just in case something more breaks out. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to have kind of this American hubris that we will, of course, we'll win a war. You guys, look who we are, how much we spend, how sophisticated our technology is. But I think, you know, we saw, for instance, with Iraq and Afghanistan, it's not all just about money. There's a, there's more that goes into it and that. And you can have more money than someone and still lose a battle to them. And so that's also in the mind of Americans.

And I don't think we can take 100% credit for this at the Soonersquare.com, Dan. But I think we can say that our reporting made a real impact on this because the Pentagon actually announced. And this was reported this morning by Fox News. They actually announced that they're gutting. Now, this is not our reporting. This is Fox. So we can't confirm this. But the Pentagon is disbanding their DEI unit because of all this criticism and concern like

Rubio, like Senator Rubio, who talked to us about this, they're gutting a lot of their DEI specialists and funding on this, kind of reworking their program. And I think the combination of R and others reporting, along with it being time to, you know, re-up the budget, the House Republican budget, really put a lot of pressure on the Pentagon to address this issue. So there might actually be some real change here. I know you're pursuing that story today. Casey looked forward to saying that, but that is all the time we have. Listeners can keep up with all of Casey Harper's reporting and more at thecentersquare.com. For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McAulb. Please subscribe. Thank you for listening.

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