The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3651 - Military Education And Masculinity In The US w/ Jasper Craven

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

For Memorial Day, author Jasper Craven joins to discuss his book on military education in the US, "God Forgives, Brothers Don't." Buy the book here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/God-Forgives-Brothers-Dont/Jasper-Craven/9781668087190

It is Monday. May 25th, 2006. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, it's Memorial Day. We have on Jasper Craven, freelance journalist, author.

of God forgives. Brothers don't. The long march of military education and the making of American manhood. Also on the program today, not much else. We are live to tape. Taking Memorial Day off.

But let's check in with our resident expert on Memorial Day, Brian. Who are? Because Brian, of course, served. honorably. Yes, sir. Nobody can take that away from me. In quotes. Thank you for your service, Brian. Thank you for your service, Brian. Now, you didn't die, so Memorial Day is not about you. No. But, you know, we can still. With the thought, I mean, you could still thank me.

In many ways, a Brian did die when you were in the military and a new Brian emerged. Wouldn't you say that? Yeah, it went in a boy. I came out of man. That's right. And then you spent a couple more years being a boy again. Right. A couple, like 20 years. Going back and forth right on the precipice. It didn't take. The manliness just didn't stick. You know, of course, like now this show has been around for two or three wars, I guess, major wars. Maybe another couple of kinetic actions.

I used to listen to Air America in the barracks. Is that right? Yes. at Fort Gordon. We would get reports of military listening to the program back in those days. So, of course, you know, the horror is that more often than not, at least certainly in the past 50, 60 years, a lot of young men.

some young women as well uh... have died in service of uh... really uh... things that we can't really outline and be explicit about uh... world war two is a lot more sort of uh... straightforward at least you know the vast majority of it i think was uh... the broad brush strokes yeah you can make a decent bedtime story of it type of thing yes exactly which is not to say that uh... any war is anything other than a racket as smetley butler would say but um some were just far more

misguided uh uh than others and far more costly and far more geared towards the benefit of a very limited number of people um and so uh uh today's memorial day give a thought uh to those who died in our military service and maybe to how we can keep those people from dying in the future um meanwhile let's play this clip before we get to uh jasper craven um this is sort of fascinating just a little bit of backstory there was a story in the new republic uh by i think was was it was a parker uh uh maloy and uh it was uh it was it was it's a broader story about what's happening with, you know, sort of right-wing media. But in terms of the Washington Post, sort of fascinating, they won two Pulitzer's, and they wanted to stream the announcement, but they had already fired all of their video people.

Um, and, uh, the, they started up a, an opinion, an opinion like a, podcast studio. Apparently the premier Washington Post YouTube channel has, um, something like 600 subscribers. That's 600,000. 600 subscribers. This is after almost 200 videos and 20 episodes. Most users on Apple Podcasts have given it 2.3 stars. The guy who built Washington Post TikTok presence left last year when it was clear that Bezos was moving the paper towards like stripping it of a lot of its reporting.

I'll talk about in that second. But anyways, he left. His channel now has over almost 400,000 subscribers in a year. The opinion podcast is 515. And at one point, Bezos was warned by his opinion editor that if you take the Washington Post and get more right leaning in your perspective, you're going to lose readers and interest. and Bezos didn't care.

And you can see this also in terms of like rolling back, he fired a ton of reporters. And the reason why you do that is, because you're a billionaire. You don't care. The newspaper is never going to make you money. The value of the newspaper is one thing and one thing only, and that is to kiss Donald Trump's ass.

And if you have a bunch of reporters, you no longer have control over, what the the paper writes about because some of these reporters are going to stumble on stuff that may be inconvenient for don't trump to know about so you're only going to have opinion writers who are paid to have an opinion that is not going to offend don't trump and here's jeff bezos being interviewed on um uh cnbc um talking about don't trump and did you realize like how much he's matured When I last interviewed you, it was about two years ago, President Trump had just won. He was not the president yet.

And I'd asked you what you thought of him at the time. And you said that you thought that he had mellowed, that he was calmer. Yeah. And I'm curious now, here we are. Yeah. I still think that. Two years later, we've had lots of wars and tariffs and all sorts of things that have happened since then. What do you think?

I think he has, I mean, I'm comparing him to his first term. Yeah. And I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. And, you know, again, I've worked with all the presidents. I will work with all the presidents. And I hope to do that going forward if they'll have me. But we need our business leaders to provide input into the administration, regardless of who the president is. I'm not on the side.

You know what? This is, I'm on the side of America. And that is so important. Like, and that's where business leaders should be. It's just, I think they're not. No, I think, no, I think we are, but we get perceived as being like, you know, partisan or whatever. Like, I was helping Obama every chance I could. I was helping Biden every chance I could.

I still call Obama for advice. He's a very smart guy. And, you know, and by the way, people that are, Trump has lots of good ideas, and he's done a lot of, he's been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due. Well, where is credit due? Ask the question.

Where is credit due? I mean, listen, listen, exactly. Well, he saved me a lot of money. I'm like a billionaire five times over. The thing to keep in mind here is, like this is what an oligarchy is. And the only sort of like slight difference is that the oligarchy is sort of permanent and who leads it is a little bit, you know, can shift. And that's what his job is. He's in it for America, not for himself. The arrogance of saying, I helped Obama as much as I could. I helped Biden.

I, the, the, the, um, and in how is that help going for the country right now? It's going well for him. It's going well for the Washington Post. Or not for the Washington Post. For Amazon, for the servers that are getting all the government contracts, for the billions of dollars that you're making for yourself, the undermining of the post office, this is just bullshit. These people need to be taxed out of existence as billionaires for America.

Is there some designer supplement out there that makes it so guys like him and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk can't finish sentences? Like, it's very strange communication. You don't understand. Their brains are firing on so many levels. I think there's something in the water at like aspirin. It's called ketamine. Yeah. Exactly.

I genuinely think they're doing something that is not helping their ability to stay on track. And I'm saying this is somebody who does things that don't help my ability to stay on track. But Bezos is particularly funny because he's got the steroid body. Yes. But he still has the nerd. I wonder if they all shoot up. I wonder if he gets into a room with Bobby Kennedy and whoever else is on it. And they all just shoot up their steroids at the same time.

Yeah. I can't wait to take it. I'm a couple years off, but I'm going to. I'm going to get so a buff. Jacked. Yeah, man. Yeah, Jeff Bezos doesn't care. Jeff Bezos doesn't care.

As long as there is no antitrust, he's okay. He didn't go on and on about Biden. Biden had some weird antitrust stuff that was anti-monopoly. He tried to help him with it. Yeah, I tried to explain to him that the monopolies are good. In a moment, Jasper Craven, freelance journalist,

author of God forgives, brothers, don't. The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood. We will be back live tomorrow. Till then, have a good Memorial Day. We are back, Sam Cedar on The Majority Report. I want to welcome to the program, Jasper Craven. Author of God forgives, Brothers Don't,

The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood. Jasper, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Sam. Let's, I mean, I don't know, I guess, like broadly speaking, you've done a history of military education in the context of how it has formed the masculinity in this country. Give us a sense of like what the starting point was. Not so much with the military education, but like, I guess when we're going back 250 some odd years, more, 250, whatever, 300 years, 250 years. What was like, what? What was like, what?

what was the nature of manhood at that time, broadly speaking? Yeah, well, there's a lot of conflicting ideas early on in the sort of revolutionary war. You know, first and foremost is a deep skepticism, a real hatred, actually, of military imperialism, of military occupation, of the red coats. But at the same time, there's sort of this practical need to accept. spell them from the country and secure independence. And so what inevitably ends up happening is that many of the founding fathers sort of nod to the need to keep military in check, to never elevate the soldier above

the citizen. And yet at the same time, they sort of like, you know, through their own vanity, elevate themselves. And most of the founding fathers were revolutionary war veterans. as these sort of prototypical Americans, strong, strapping, unafraid of bullets whizzing by. I mean, everyone likes to say that Washington, you know, was very careful not to sort of nourish his image so as to be like elevated as a sort of princely, kingly figure. But there were a million different mist that he sort of, you know, actively cultivated in

his early years. He had two funerals, one of which had like insane military honors equivalent to what Genghis Khan was sort of sent off into the afterworld with. And so really there's, you know, there ends up being a sort of practical need to or a practical wish to keep a strong army to sort of keep the British at bay to keep suppressing indigenous people. And there's sort of like, interestingly enough, you know, while the. army is demobilized after the war. There's basically this little nugget of officers left at West Point, which was a very important strategic post during the war. And then from there, what you see is the military industrial complex grow. It's really like a few dozen guys into what we see today. And from that point forward, really, military brass, politicians, you know,

there's a million other cultural inputs, are sort of equating manhood with, the key sort of signatures of military service. And really what I argue is this was kind of like a cynical effort to ensure that there would always be young boys that they could, you know, bring into the system and stay well prepared, essentially. I mean, so is this like, I mean, how much of the development of the prototypical American male, right, which I guess like, and you, you write about some of the contradictions, the idea that we're ruggedly individualist, but also, I mean, God forgives, but brothers don't, right? Like, they're brothers

all of a sudden. You've joined a brotherhood. And I also, I want to circle back to that title, because it's pretty fascinating. But how much of it was the, the, the, the, the military understanding that it needed to create this version of masculinity to sort of propagate the military, like, or was there this sort of, you know, version of masculinity as you are going through the frontier that needed to be fed into the, you know, that was fed into the military. Yeah, no, it's a good question. I mean, many people will argue that man is inherently violent.

And surely, like, world history shows that fighter has been sort of man's defining vocation. He has been relied upon to, you know, secure territory and open up the seas to trade. And, you know, there were certain practical needs many moons ago to sort of like have men fight and just secure survival for his family, his country, all the rest. I mean, the same is true of the sort of, you know, territorial conquest that marked the early days of America. And so, yeah, I mean, there's an argument to be made that this was necessary. I mean, maybe you make the sort of, like, optimistic argument that diplomacy could have

secured some of these victories. I'm not entirely convinced of that. I mean, I do think that like, you know, this sort of violent, strong understanding of masculinity has sort of seeped into man at the genomic level just because all of our family trees include, you know, deep veins of military service. Like today, obviously, 2% of Americans serve. But you go back a couple of generations and most of us have some, you know, great grandfather who was probably traumatized. through, you know, some pretty heavy stuff. So like, it's deeply embedded. And, and I acknowledge there's certain practical aims.

But really what has happened over the, I mean, really since the Cold War is that, like, these ideas, which are very fragile, you know, and sort of potentially can spin out of control very quickly because they're sort of oriented around violence and subjugation and power, they have just like completely mutated into really like you know hyper violent hyper aggressive high testosterone you know like

roided out masculinity and this is what we see with clavicular people saying hi tea and like some of these this early obsession with the male form and the body sort of date back to World War II when like military generals were sort of concerned about the like weird you genetics, bodybuilding stuff that Hitler was doing.

Like, there's certainly like a fascist influence on all of this as well as I write in the book. But, yeah, I mean, the book basically argues that, like, maybe those old ideas had some merit, but they're completely irrelevant now just to how we fight wars to what's required of man. And so they're, like, completely outmoded, which is part of the reason why man feels so, like, empty because he's not really able to actually, you know, prove himself in these ways in any way that enriches his country or his family.

And so, you know, the sort of idle, violent man just sort of turns inward or into his community. And, you know, here we are. MLK had said every bond that goes off in Vietnam explodes in this country. And largely, you know, if you train a cadre of people to do one thing and that thing is not available for them to actually do, then it seeps out in other places. All right. So let's, and I want to go through some of the history anyways.

It's a fascinating history, the development of, of, of like the, the military education and, and, and, and how that formed a masculinity,

um, uh, through the, the history of the country. But I also wonder in, and, and I did not know this, but the,

God forgives, uh, brothers don't is a was not only the the saying of um of um of the motto of the west point football team apparently it's also the omerta code of the aryan brotherhood um which came first and how much of that relationship um uh you know regardless of regardless of whether whichever came first, but which came first and how much of that relationship is indicative of the sort of the fascism that you need for imperialism, particularly the early military in this country was all about we're humans, they're not, we take their land, this is how we do it.

Yeah, no, great question. fact of the matter is that the Aryan Brotherhood, a white power prison gang, developed, God forgives Brothers Don't as their Omerta Code in the 1980s. So that came first. And then around 1996, the West Point football team adopted it as their motto. Now, the exact sort of time and underlying motivations there are not entirely clear. But it does seem like a group of West Point footballers watched this movie called Stone Cold in the early 90s, which is about a white supremacist biker gang, sort of loosely inspired by the Aryan Brotherhood.

And they liked what they saw there. And so that seems to be sort of the most tangible evidence of like a direct connection between people in the military at West Point playing football, seeing themselves in, you know, and a sort of similar ideology to this white supremacist gang. You know, it's very clear from the earliest days of West Point and other military schools that like the the very specific structure was authoritarian. And people who championed this model argued that you needed an authoritarian, fascist model to secure democracy. And so while, you know, many people like to believe that service academies like West Point, Annapolis, et cetera, are sort of these like Ivy League level liberal arts, enlightened places, they have forever relied on dehumanization. I mean, I talk a lot in the book about really just nasty racism that pervaded Vietnam post-9-11 conflicts. I mean, it's really as old as time. It just wasn't as discussed as much in earlier imperial conquests.

And that dehumanization is sort of really learned through the hierarchy that exists at these places. You know, there's the plebe who comes in. and all of the elder cadets basically ravage them, abuse them. They are not considered whole until they sort of undergo just really intense abuse. And so, you know, while there's a promise of true brotherhood, often that it's forever fleeting. I mean, the military is always withholding complete validation or even really complete humanity. I mean, one old West Point cadet I spoke to compared the experience to like BDSM where you sort of have rights and privileges meet it out very slowly as you're sort of just getting like grinded down.

I mean, it's it's cultish. There's indoctrination. It's about scrubbing away your humanity. And ultimately, just getting you to a place where you're capable of waging state violence. I mean, that's sort of also the paradox, right, is that it ostensibly is building you up as an individual, specifically, you know, an individual, a man. But at the same time, it's also explicitly breaking you down and essentially saying you have no free will. Your will is ours. Like all of what you have is ours. You get to keep the, you get to keep the affect, I guess.

is really what it comes down to. And it is obviously, I mean, that's what the military has felt that it's needed to do for an extended period of time. Let's, I mean, let's jump into the history as you go through this. I mean, you bring out that the early sort of like father of West Point's, I guess educational system was a guy named Sylvanus Thayer. And very early on, they understood we need to sort of have more technical-minded people rather than humanities-minded people because of what we're going to ask of them. And we don't want them thinking too much about other things.

Right. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, Thayer grew up in Massachusetts, comes from a long line of Puritans. And so there's a very Puritanical spirit that he brings to the military. You know, serious, brutal punishments for minor infractions, securing, you know, discipline and specific sorts of behavior. And then, yes, really sort of undertaking a curriculum that is less about, you know, developing the soul, then sort of creating a pliant body. He, you know, does a way with Latin, English courses, plays, extracurriculars, vacations. There's really nothing left. No real joy he left in the place. Like, he really squeezes it all out and imposes. And it was there before. Yes.

Well, yeah, there was sort of an early skirmish between him and an old frat brother at Dartmouth named Alden Partridge. And Partridge was sort of, he saw these boys as as his children, sort of. I mean, he was much warmer than fair.

I mean, certainly there were still punishments and hierarchy, but relatively speaking, he allowed the humanities to flourish and felt that, cadets should have some influence on this curriculum as it was developing. He developed a lot of loyalty among these cadets because he treated them humanely. But it was basically decided that there would be a better foundational superintendent because he could be relied upon to instill unwavering obedience. I mean, a big problem early on in the army was,

was that there were a lot of defections. And, you know, there was not this sort of, there, there's actually a few, like, French military generals who come to try to shape the military and they're frustrated that the Americans don't listen to their orders. They ask why, why should I do this? And so Thayer kind of tries to stamp that out. What was happening in European military schools at that time? Was it analogous?

Were they doing the same type of thing? Like, is this a military? phenomena that in some respects you could see in Europe as well, but in America somehow the influence of determining masculinity is more prominent. Yeah, well, Europe definitely had a pretty strong network of military academies at this point. And the most famous of which was called Ecoli Polytechnique, which famously reared Napoleon Bonaparte and Faire was obsessed with Napoleon.

His whole childhood, he studied up on his campaigns and just felt, you know, he sort of saw him as the pinnacle of manhood. Certainly at some point, Europeans got sick of Napoleon and banished him and sort of

felt like, I mean, he was just constantly identifying enemies, always sort of engaging in these grand military campaigns. And so there was kind of a backlash to that sort of form of masculinity and militarism. No such thing really happened in America. I mean, certainly there's like this strange,

these strange dynamics that have pervaded this country for a long time where like the citizenry isn't actually that gung-ho about militarism much of the time, but still because of, you know, political forces, big money, all the rest. we sort of continue to just like feed this system, feed this machine. It's become so entrenched now that like, you know, it sort of militarism becomes inevitable. But yeah, I mean, and it was less militarism in Europe by this, by sort of the early days of America was less entrenched and and militarism was less sort of necessary to one's identity of manhood. I mean, I guess at that point, I mean, you have, as we develop a sort of the modern military, you have centuries of culture that exist there. And there's a lot more to work with.

I mean, the military is so fundamental to the founding of the to America as anything other than a colony. And it's so, it's so fundamental. I guess it's going to have more influence in that, in that respect. Let's, let's move forward to the scabbard and blade, which is like the military fraternity that was sort of, I guess, sort of like a function as like an alumni association, maybe? I don't know. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a lot of sort of inputs.

I broadly define military education as including Congressional Chartered Service Academies like West Point, the 5200 ROTC and JROTC programs in public high schools and colleges, the Boy Scouts. And then there was for a time scabbard and blade, which was like a military-style fraternity, started at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1910s. This is sort of the first effort by military leaders

to squelch, you know, the long noble history of anti-war activism on college campuses. There was a lot of spoiling by, you know, industrialists and politicians for entree into World War I. A lot of energy on campus, not for that to happen. I mean, many early pioneers of education in this country were pacifists, suffragettes, socialists, John Dewey. I mean, there was this really interesting ideology around education that explicitly felt like if you could sort of nurture a boy's imagination, that you could sort of conceive of a world and then create one that was peaceful. You know, Dewey talks about this at length. And Scabbard and Blade was sort of established by the military, connected to ROTC chapters on campus to sort of offer.

an alternative path, an enticing network like any fraternity that offered access to girls and parties and, you know, badges and uniforms and all of the rest. I mean, it sort of was this place where you were elevated on campus to sort of an exemplar. And, you know, they did, there was one old newspaper clip I dug up that there was like a kissing ceremony that one of chapters held where apparently 250 girls were kissed by scabbard and blade members over an afternoon. And so, like, you also sort of see how, like, gender starts to play into this and, and, you know, just men clearly feeling that wearing a uniform and serving was, was critical to sort of, you know, securing a nice wife and meaning and identity and all of the rest.

How much of, like, the, the compulsion to sort of rod, the cultural tentacles of the military, for lack of a better description, was a function of the idea that we may have to fight wars that are getting further and further away from the United States. And the, you know, through the 19th century, you know, we are protecting Americans, we're protecting a nascent country from either invasion or from hostile, indigenous people, and we need to expand. I mean, all of it is sort of like there's an immediacy in terms of like proximity that going to Europe to fight doesn't necessarily have. How much of like was there a sense within the context of the military

and where have you found examples of of that urgency of like, we need to make this thing, you know, I mean, because as a kid, it's like you want adventure, go off the places, which is not the pitch in,

you know, the 1800s, obviously. Yeah. And so, uh, what, like, what,

how does that turn get made? It's a really good observation. And basically what happens is in the early 1900s, a bunch of bankers and weapons manufacturers, DuPont, J.P. Morgan, Guggenheim, et cetera. They help. And also Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, one of the Salzburgers from the New York Times family is involved in all of this. They sort of astroturf this idea, this movement called preparedness. And this was sort of to deal. with what you're talking about. Because, you know, for most American citizens, yes, there was no immediate threat to the homeland. They were just fine to sort of, you know, live their happy lives and support domestic priorities and all the rest.

But what the preparedness movement does is really saber rattles against, you know, with this idea of a coming invasion. Very explicit language. This language was used actually by Justin Morrill, a congressman to establish ROTC in the first, place mandated at land grant colleges when they were being created. And so, yeah, it's basically, you know, these very thin, propagandizing ideas that some enemy, whomever, it often very poorly defined was sort of coming to get us.

And then from there, you sort of see, like, you know, that there's these ideologies that must be defeated, these, you know, porous ideologies that can creep onto American soil. But you're totally right. There was not any attitude to go into any, you know, real energy to go into World Wars one or two for that matter. But you just see like these very powerful influential industrialists, people in the media, politicians sort of push for it anyways. Let's talk about the sort of following that era into World War II and into the Cold War, the idea of strength and how this, the idea of manhood and militarism, you know, sort of conjoined and we're, you know, I keep thinking of like how I saw it represented as a kid

in the 70s and the 80s, you know, even down to like, whatever it was, Rocky 4. or something where he's fighting the Soviet Union. But this notion of, of, of, we need to be, men need to be strong. And, and this is, the militarism spreads in some level where it's, there's an attempt to create a bridge with civilian life and military life. Yeah. I mean, World War II is a crucial moment here. And what I sort of tell this chapter of history in the book through this man named Bernard McFadden, who was this sort of mercurial, macho, early bodybuilding magazine publisher.

He's sort of like if you took Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. and Andrew Tate and sort of threw them into, you know, amalgamation machine. Very skeptical of vaccines, for instance, put forward a lot of like weird ideas around nutrition and strength. He founded a number of military schools and had a massive magazine empire of some of the first fitness magazines. and he was very focused on building strength in the American man. I mean, he was a blatant eugenicist, flirted with strongmen like Mussolini and Hitler, visited Mussolini actually and sort of gay, you know, took in some of his weak Italian recruits and, you know, puffed them up in all the right ways. but you see his influence pretty profoundly on how the military is viewing itself, its needs,

its weaknesses in the run-up to our entree into World War II. In just a few years, thanks to the lobbying of McFadden and others, the Army completely scraps its physical standards and rewrites new ones that are emphasizing, fighting, you know, bare-knuckle boxing, strength, push-up, none of this had really existed before. At the same time, there's a national, there's a federal effort to build hundreds of gymnasiums across the country. There's an interesting sort of like fusion at this point with PE teachers

who were up until this point not really taken very seriously, but you see the military like elevating PE teachers on the same footing as like, you know, an ethics teacher. I mean, to this day, the head PE teacher at West Point is called the Master of the Sword. And so, like, there's this real intense movement. Also, like, I think before our involvement in World War II, only about a third of Americans said they went to the gym or had a workout havoc. That spikes to 60% in a couple of years. And a lot of this, again, is, like, focused around trying to sort of meet the Hitler's and Mussolini's fascist ideals around, like, the perfect.

body, the sleek, tight. You know, I mean, there's also a bunch of homoerotic stuff undergirding a lot of this with McFadden and others. But, yeah, and sort of the conflation of physical strength, bodybuilding, military service, fighting with manhood. I mean, McFadden's media empire rivaled William Randolph Hurst's. And so it was profoundly influential. It's so fascinating because.

this is an era where war making becomes more mechanized. And so presumably you need less physical strength as opposed to back when you need your musket and after your one shot, you're going in there and you're doing hand-to-hand combat. Yeah. That's when you would think that you would need, that would be the peak. And that as you, but this, that era is, is, is. fascinating in the ascent of like bodybuilding as a both a military and sort of civilian vision of what of what a manhood should be and all the the anti-vax stuff and the sort of

RFK stuff that we're seeing today are just so eerily similar and we should remember this is coming in the wake of the first global pandemic in the so-called Spanish flu. So it's, I guess it's just sort of fascinating what comes out of that era. Let's talk about lastly about like it, well, there's a couple of more things I wanted to get to. the um how christianity and not just christianity because there was obviously this like sort of protestant puritanical uh ethic that was there at its beginning but the the theocratic the rise of a theocratic um um a real religiosity in the military and much of this is sort of like um i i would argue probably post vietnam so maybe we should we should be

put a pin in that on some level and talk about how Vietnam changed the military and manhood. You got full metal jacket behind you on that poster. I would imagine there's a couple others there. But how Vietnam changed both the military, but the military cell of masculinity? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, certainly the religious element is very important with Vietnam because military brass understood at some point that because they were no longer fighting a war with any sort of tangible moral center that, you know, big, broad nebulous ideas. around religion were sort of crucial to fusing to the military mission to sort of create these these broader ideas around salvation and sacrifice um it really you know we see the u.s. Air Force academy

founded just after world war two and there's where you really see this like deep evangelical theocratic idea of military service take hold um which again sort of like it doesn't a million different things, but one of them is that it also just creates incredible ego and a sense of superiority among, you know, military members. That you need to have to go across the world and kill people without any sort of like the flimsyest of notion that this is going to spread communism, which, of course, was also a threat to Christianity. Yes.

In the Korean War, we had at least the tent pole or, you know, close line of, we're doing this for the sake of the UN. And the UN is important because that is the response to World War II. And this is the new international order. And there was some other sort of like defining principle and morality associated with it. It started getting much harder with Vietnam. Absolutely. And so then it just, we enter an era of violence for violence sake. I mean, there's also sort of these interrelated ideas with our dropping of the bomb that just like in which these sort of these, these, you know, new titants of industry and military technology feel this awesome power and sort of conceive of themselves as like almost pious figures, as almost godlike.

I mean, you hear some of them, I mean, Charles Lindberg included talk about flight. And there's just like this sort of intoxicated idea of power and self and destruction that starts to sort of infect, you know, down the ranks. I mean, the irony, of course, is that while America felt like it now had this, you know, unstoppable air force, we see in Vietnam, thousands of planes shot down with pretty crude technology. I mean, so that idea gets challenged and undermined very fast. But nonetheless, Vietnam, because there's no, there's nothing like, the entire war is racked with lies and propaganda and such thin morals, often war crimes and just like brutal behavior that you sort of start to see masculinity warp in really messed up ways.

and it becomes extremely individualistic, whereas before in World War II, you could sort of cast your service as, you know, around some shared global mission or, you know, there was a certain level of collectivism there. But now it's really just sort of this mercenary soldier of fortune style, warfare and conception of military service. That's where you see Rambo, you know, sort of emerge.

There's resentment, deep resentment towards, the country for not sufficiently supporting the war. There's resentment towards politicians for not sufficiently keeping the war going. I mean, obviously, there's lots of anti-war sentiments within the ranks, but it just, you just start to see like a hardening of, of the military man. And rather than sort of like fighting for some broader improvements on the global stage, it's just sort of about body counts. I mean, obviously this is what Westmoreland was focused on.

It was the kill ratios are what determined who was winning. And so violence becomes, you know, violence becomes a virtue, essentially. I can't help but think of just the storyline of Apocalypse now, which of course is, you know, it's an anti-war film. But there's many different themes you could have used other than sort of a lone individual, just sort of want, like there's just just. a series of individuals, more or less, throughout that film with all their own specific agendas as to how they're going to get through the day, which I imagine exists in the context of, of war throughout the years, but it not depicted in that way. The allusions of war to the extent that they were depicted before were still in the context of sort of a broader,

mission. But be that as it may, let's talk about where we are at today, because it feels like the military does not have the hold on the culture in the wake of Vietnam that it had prior and that there's been different times in attempts for reformation. I mean, it's funny, it feels like anti-war people of which I would count myself amongst them have more sympathy particularly following up maybe it was following a rock towards the military or military personnel but less association with or the military's less ability to find masculinity in the way that it did Yeah, I mean, you see sort of, you sort of see a brief blip after 9-11 of, you know, blind patriotism, you know, enrollment at military school spikes. There's many positive media depictions, but it's very fleeting.

And, you know, really, I would say by the early aughts, the military. Terry's grip on culture and on ideas around masculinity have really loosened. I mean, what is happening with Pete Hegseth today is a reassertion of an attempted reassertion of that influence because, you know, there were still young men like Pete Hegeseth, who entered the military for very specific reasons, those being power, self-aggrandizement, identity, status, all of the rest, maybe a political career in his case. And so when that sort of like that, that long time sort of promise that the military will give you all these things didn't come to pass, he became deeply resentful and cynical and

angry. I mean, maybe he should have seen it coming, but like, you know, you see this sort of arc where he spends his time after being in Iraq and Afghanistan trying to sort of like legitimize the war, you know, through like classic neocon talking points around democracy and all the rest. And then once that doesn't pan out and like the public just completely sours on everything, that's when he starts to turn to these really accurate arguments not unlike the POW movement, just sort of like these revisionist ideas

around what lost this war. Because of course he is completely incapable of self-reflection or reckoning with the broader forces at play. And so instead, Pete Hegeseth to sort of keep this fragile ego and manhood alive for himself blames women and people of color.

And that's kind of like, this easy, you know, narrative that he can perpetuate. And then now as, as defense secretary, he is like hoping, I mean, it feels, I don't know what what his actual, I mean, motives are. There are many. But I think he's hoping that he can sort of try to, like, wrestle an older, an old school idea of what the military is back into today's orbit. maybe in hopes that that will sort of like revive the brand or sort of, you know,

make the military great again or whatever. I mean, I think I think it's probably a lost cause, you know, beyond a sort of certain segment of people. I mean, the weird thing too now is that like the Republican Party and Pete Higseth are playing to a lot of just like guys who don't serve in the military and frankly, don't want to serve because they're smart enough to understand how kind of self-destrored and just like rough it can be. And so they're just sort of posing in military garb.

They're working as, you know, security guards or cops. And but and yet they still sort of identify themselves as like protectors of the homeland. And so it's sort of morphed, you know, beyond. It's a lot of ice, right? I mean, that's. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. I mean, the, the, the fascinating thing to me is that, um, the Iraq war seemed to be And we certainly got this, you know, in the wake of Vietnam, right? I mean, you would see movies where, and Rambo was one of them even, but Deer Hunter. I mean, there was many vets return and they are lost. And difficult. I mean, you saw this after the Korean War at some extent too. But it really like Iraq, the Iraq war really felt like.

really felt like where there was a mundane quality to the suffering of military personnel and the introduction of like the sort of mainstreaming of the notion of PTSD and the idea of advances in trauma therapies and whatnot all cut against the image of masculinity that that the military had been propagating even through like the Vietnam thing like Rambo is disaffected but he's still you know like ultra strong and he's still going out there and they still maintain that but in the wake of Iraq we heard about things like traumatic brain injuries and we saw the implications of this stuff where the fallout was more sort of mundane and realistic. Like, this is, people are having a very, a very difficult time with their

families. It's causing a divorce. It's breaking up, uh, homes. Children are sort of like losing their parents and, you know, not just literally, but it, you know, in terms of, uh, emotionally. And, um, that all sort of conspires to create the wokeness that Hegsith is, is fighting against. Yeah. Um, I, I guess it's impossible to get a notion of where we go. from here, but it feels like his project, I mean, it may have sticking points just in terms of who he's getting rid of and how hard it is to sort of move an institution in any way that doesn't involve just getting rid of people as opposed to sort of like reinserting new ideals. Yeah. I mean, it's a really good question and I'm not sure what the future pertends. I mean,

I know, and I've spoken, you know, to many of them, like there does exist this contingent of professional non-politicized officers who are pretty competent, who despise Hegg Seth. Often it should be noted on sort of like sort of macho, masculine proven grounds. It's like, oh, well, he didn't get his Ranger tab and like, I did and I saw the shit and his deployments, you know, weren't that heavy and blah, blah, blah, but whatever. And, you know, it's, it's really hard to get a sense of where the institution stands today because it's so massive. But like, you know, he's firing, you know, two star, three star generals of color. He is, you know, gutting like sexual, military sexual assault programs. He is welcoming in, I think pretty explicitly. people who are angry, disaffected, harbor reactionary views.

Military service is now the number one predictor of violent extremism in America. January 6th was largely perpetuated by veterans. Afterwards, there was some backlash from the military officer class, but there were also more than 100 retired military officers who penned a defense of Trump in the Washington Post. I mean, you know, the fact of the matter is, is that the military, as we've said, like it has these sort of authoritarian streaks. And so it's that things could get bad. And certainly Trump and Hengseth have been testing the sort of limits of what they

can do with military power, whether it's deploying National Guard domestically. I mean, ICE, as you know, it has sort of emerged as this domestic militarized force. You know, I mean, like a scholar of fascism told me for the book that to really sort of cross the Rubicon and and you know get a military under your control under a leader's control you sort of have to you know form a pedagogical project and at places like West Point heggseth has engaged in a huge crackdown scrub books like Tony Morrison from the shelves of the library fired civilian professors, fired military ethicists, et cetera. And unfortunately, the culture at the military is one of obedience, ultimately.

And so, I mean, there were a few months ago, some of the vets in the Dem vets in Congress did that video where they said, you know, it's your duty to, to not follow an illegal order. Well, that never happens practically. You can talk to, you know, any jag you want. And they'll tell you that that just doesn't jive with how the military works. And even some of the men and women who've left the military, who surely have very illuminating things to say in recent months, have not spoken out.

There remains a deep loyalty to this institution. And so it's difficult to get like a clear picture of what's going on, what might happen, and how to reform it. I mean, you know, the Pentagon can't pass an audit. There is so much murkiness here. Indeed. Jasper Craven, the book is God forgives. Brothers Don't.

The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood. We'll link to that at majority.fm and in our podcast and YouTube descriptions. Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. to get to where I want But I know when I just got caught in advance