The Pete Quiñones Show - The Destruction of the American Military w/ Lee Enfield

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

84 MinutesPG-13Lee Enfield is an Army vet and the proprietor of En Bloc Press. Lee joins Pete to comment on a long Twitter thread by Catgirl Kulak in which he details the history of military service and the weakening of America's military. Lee gives his opinion of the information presented in the thread and how the US military has fallen so far. This was episode 951.EnBlocPress.comCatgirl Kulak's Tweet Content on SubstackPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show, returning and somebody I always enjoy talking to. Lee Anfield, how you don't like? Hey, Pete. How are you? Thanks for having me back. Yeah, man. Well, why don't you hit some plugs right up front? And, you know, then we'll jump into this something that I can't remember the last time I did an episode where it was like based on a tweet.

But I think this is a good one. So I want you hit some plugs. Yeah, sure. My name's Lee. I write over at InBlock Press. It's EnvL-O-C-Press.com. That's a newsletter about pre-printing guns and politics. So yeah, let's go check it out. We've got a paid-in-free option over there. You get content each week. And, yeah, again, Pete, thanks for having me on. This is an interesting topic. I saw this. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. So I was happy to get the invite. Yeah, cool, man. All right. Well, let's jump right. in then I'm going to pull the tweet up so we both can uh anyone who's watching the video

can read it too and this is from a tweet from cat girl cuck a narconomicon and um yeah just for people so people know um cat girl colac is actually a male so um lee had actually i didn't know that and i i suspected it i didn't know it for sure and then lee's like well i uh i heard him on uh Alex Koshuta's show and I'm like, how did I miss that one? So I'm feeling a little bit dumb here. But you ready to let me just start reading this? And you can interrupt me anytime you want. Yeah, go ahead.

All right. So the tweet goes, and this is a long one, why no one wants to join the military? And what, before we do that, jump in. Obviously, OPSEC is really important for you. Do you want to talk at all, give people a little idea of what your military service or anything like that?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm a GWAT vet, did, you know, one tour in Iraq, just a normal infantry guy. I did one contract. Got out, it feels like ancient history. I mean, I got out in 2008. So it's been a minute. The military has obviously changed, but some of the stuff that we're talking about is kind of timeless concepts.

and so yeah just a regular guy but yeah I did do a tour in Iraq with 82nd so it's something I can talk about with some degree of familiarity all right so like I said interrupt me anytime so anarchonomicons says starts out I've been reading the second world war by sandhurst military historian John Keegan it explained a ton about 19th century early 20th century military culture I didn't get. The Edwardians were patriotic as hell. The military was massively popular. The average person ate 1,200 calories a day,

whereas soldiers in Garrison ate 1,400 and higher quality food at that. It was a massive education and networking opportunity for people of all classes and produced bonds that would be necessary for social advancement. conscription was massively popular and demanded from the population during peacetime, less because they wanted to make sure no one was shirking, and more because they didn't want lower class people left behind and all the opportunity in the army hoarded by the connected who'd be able to get into a volunteer force. In Britain, which had always aboard conscription and had Whig proto-libertarian objections to it, the populist practically rebelled and formed illegal regiments and militias and drilled to participate in martial life.

This was a phenomenon across Europe and after the Treaty of Versailles restricting Germany to a scant 100,000 strong army. The country was flooded with free crops, non-government paramilitaries, and militias to either advance some political movement or just be part of military. life. This was after World War I. Millions of young men had just died as part of regiments many little different than this. And yet, there was this much demand from young men to be part of the martial world. This is because the military and military life was actually a good career move and actually formed lifelong bonds in the early 20th century. Amidst the population boom of the early 20th century and all the excess young men with little inheritance, the military and militia life was a major vehicle for social mobility and aspiration and forming social connections.

So what changed? Why is it almost completely opposite in early 21st century America? These attitudes survived the world wars, even the Western Front of World War I, but they were devoured by Vietnam in the civil rights era. Implicit in a lot of 19th and 20th century militarism was the vision of every soldier a citizen, every citizen a soldier. This ethos was first expressed during the French Revolution. It was aspirational. The subjects divorced from the state and military were now armed and able to participate in civic and military life. They were now citizens.

Of course, by the early 20th century, this sounds very menacing. Soldiers must obey orders every day. every citizen is soldier and bound to obey on pain of death. That's totalitarianism. Indeed, a friend recently said, you know the Weimar Republic may have been the only true democracy in history. We talk about how your vote matters and you're deciding your government, but really the public has little say. Barack Obama versus John McCain was literally the option presented to America. That was their spectrum of options. Whereas Weimar, Germany, They had monarchism, liberalism, communism, fascism, all right there on the ballot, and any of them could win, and one of them did.

It wasn't a coincidence that this seeming pinnacle of democracy exactly coincided with and produced the era when the most men were in uniform and many women in auxiliaries. The ethos of universal suffrage and universal conscription went hand in hand with the contradiction. it implies, are you master of your country? Or is every other person in your country now master of you? Are you empowered with your, I assume that's rifle, to move the politics of Europe? Or is that rife? Do you know? I read it as rifle.

I think it's just, okay. Okay. So are you empowered with your rifle to move the politics of Europe? Or have you been enslaved to your state people and their fate? one might think this is the source of their disillusionment, but America had conscription and its 1940s martial ethos through the 50s and into the 60s. But of course there's a contradiction between universal suffrage and this masculine martial conception of the citizen.

Why is the vote of a woman or disabled man who've never served equivalent to a man who's been taxed years of his life and often? and extraordinarily risk and effort. How exactly does racial equality work when some groups are underrepresented in military life and are perceived to be underrepresented in the most dangerous roles? These questions were papered over with discrimination. What did you do during the war was an interview question that made or broke your entire economic life in a world where a massive percentage of people had served.

This was a massive inducement to do so, and indeed you could still hear concerns about missing a war in the 50s and being shut out of the aspirations and opportunities available to other luckier cohorts of young men. Obviously, even though there was little legal barriers to women fulfilling most corporate and professional roles, this fact of life was a massive barrier. But then the 64 Civil Rights Act was passed, and the logic. of it necessitated affirmative action to women and underrepresented minorities, whilst at the same time a new generation of upper middle class young men, insulated by one of the most abundant and forgiving economies in world history, were encouraged by family and friends to either avoid the draft with bogus medical excuses, hide out in university, or indeed dip out of the country for a spell. And far from suffering a fatal blow to their career and social prospect for what previous

generation would have called cowardice. They were rewarded. Military service became increasingly a marker of the lower class and the liberal-educated non-serving class already critical of the war out of self-serving concern to not be drafted. Latched onto tales of war crimes in Vietnam, often going so far as insulting and spitting, literally or figuratively, on returning soldiers not wealthy enough to dip into University. There were no return parades. GI benefits were often non-existent with some

unable to health care for, even malaria. A disease, a New Yorker probably didn't catch at home. And not only were they not given priority and employment, lacking both the right ethnicity and the university degree, where are the only qualifications protected from a disparate impact assessment, many fell to the bottom of the economic letter. America's recruitment capacity really never recovered. Total U.S. military personnel shrank from 3.5 in 1969 to 2 million in 1985 to 1.3 million today, even as the U.S. population has increased from 200 million to 330 million. America has gone from over 1% of the population actively serving at any time to nearly

a third of that. The professionalization of the U.S. military to an all-volunteer force has, in effect, just been a cover for this collapse in recruiting capacity. America's military isn't significantly structurally different. These aren't really professionals. Your average three-year contract private isn't making some obscene yuppie amount of money for his ambitious professional commitment. A private makes under $30,000 a year.

a second lieutenant with a university degree and years of professional development, who may have had to plan out his career from 16 years old, getting a congressman's letter of recommendation to attend West Point or another service academy makes 40 to 60,000 a year. USGD per capita is 72,000. If that lieutenant had gone to a second-tier school and gotten a computer science degree, he'd be making six figures and have vastly more control over his life. It's not a good career move in the 1780s or 1900s and ambitious...

Let me start that again. It's not a good career move. In the 1780s or 1900s, an ambitious ion of a decayed noble family desiring to conquer the world might want to become an artillery officer. Today, he wants to work on Wall Street or at Google. Even if you're starting out from a very rough place there or almost certainly a dozen better things you could do to advance yourself faster for better money and with less effort than joining the military.

This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing.

Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. only appear of the only appeal of the military for decades now has been to people who really want to escape their situation, who really felt they needed to hard reboot their life, or who are really drawn to military life out of sheer love of it. And then the army went woke. Wokeness is toxic to the army, not just because of the values clash with most ordinary recruits, but it places front and center the entire dynamic that makes the military such,

an awful career path. Not only are young men not enticed to join the military out of the knowledge that they're wasting years, not getting a university degree, or that their gender, skin color, and sexual orientation are still going to count against them even once they're out. They're not having it declared to them that they'll suffer that disdain and discrimination even in the military, invariably by some fat university-educated minority woman brought in to give a diversity lecture. Even whilst you're serving the U.S. government,

it's going to rub your face in the fact that it's undermining you and your career, and it's somehow a mystery the Army can't recruit. The U.S. military is taken close to half of the people it took in the 1980s, and it still can't find anyone. Meanwhile, it's not uncommon to hear in various forums open talk from active military that if the U.S. military were used in an international war against dissent by the Trump and proletariat, they desert. Indeed, anonymous leaked U.S. military wargaming projects, something close to a 50% desertion rate in any major civil conflict.

And there's nothing to be done to save it. There's no will to double or triple. pays to reflect GDP or what similar effort could be could get a person in the U.S. economy, don't enlist go fracking or Alaskan crab fishing. There's no political will to undo the bizarre system of racial and sexual patronage that benefits everyone except the productive class that drives the U.S. economy. And there's no way any of the elite would recreate a world where military service was a better guarantee of job prospects and financial security.

than a university degree. So America's effective recruitment capacity and civil feeling will continue to collapse, even as Americans hate each other and their government even more. You think recruit capacity is bad now? Wait till they imprison Trump. So that was a lot. I mean, the thing about old Twitter when you only had 140 characters and then 280, and now you can do things like this.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's, there's a lot there. So when I guess it starts off talking about just the whole idea that there was a time when going into the military basically brought about gave you in society, like some kind of, you know, something a lot more than people clapping for you at the airport. It was like you were in basically another class, like a separate class. Is that how you read history? Yeah, yeah.

And this is something, this is a theme that is recurrent in writings and, you know, autobiographies, things like this by war fighters since, since the beginning, right? I mean, you see some of this sentiment, I mean, this has been around since, like, since the Greeks, since the Romans before that. And this is something, I mean, a lot of things have gone off the rails

in the last 50 years in America, right? There's a lot of inversion of reality in the way things are, are kind of postured at this point is pretty out of touch with a lot of, a lot of how life was for, you know, thousands of years before it. And the ability, like if you went off and you did,

you know, if you did, did your duty, um, that, that was kind of how a man might earn his, uh, make his bones,

so to speak, right? Like this was, uh, something that young men traditionally were tasked. with your country needs you you go do your thing you fight the fight take the pain make the sacrifices carry the weight come home uh and then you know then you intern to that phase of your life where you have a have a family or career or things like that and that's where a lot of a lot of you know

masculine social standing at least uh comes from right this is uh this is something that a lot of a lot of people have written, you know, volumes about some of these things are, there are prerequisites for this, right? Like this is not something that you can force into existence through HR policies and diversity initiatives and things like this. there's just no way to kind of defy reality on this right like you you can't fight a war against reality because you're going to lose and when you try to create a reality that relies on a military that is too small things too highly of itself it's staffed by people who uh for whatever reason

you know just just don't have the ethos needed to be successful uh in a martial sense eventually you're going to run into some very serious problems and this is kind of what the U.S. military is teetering on currently some of these cracks started to show through in GWAT,

Vietnam, Korea. I mean, it hasn't been like a great 60, 70 years for the U.S. military all told. You know what I mean? Like the decisiveness of the kinetic ability exceeds the will to victory by the political class and by the upper middle class.

You know, this tweet does a good job of discussing the social dynamics in Vietnam where if you had just enough money to get into college, you didn't have to actually go serve. And if you did not have enough money to get into college, then, you know, you had to go fight in the jungles in Vietnam. and then get told that, you know, you're an asshole for doing that when you came back, right? Like this is kind of signals the beginning of the end and a genuine erosion in some of the basic necessities to create like an effective martial society, right?

And people might hear that and say, well, you know, the United States is not a martial society. society. And that's basically not quite true, right? Like most of the famous martial societies throughout history, if you look at the Romans, the Greeks, these were civilizations that largely, like the Greeks, particularly relied on like the concept of like government by consent,

right? Like these were free men who would fight. And this is a concept that, I mean, I mean, this goes back. Like, Xenophon writes about this. Like, this is not, you know, something novel. This is a prerequisite. And this is something that, you know, Ben Franklin talks about, you know, this idea. Like, like the Catgirl-Culac mentions, he says, implicit in 19th and 20th century

militarism is a version of every soldier of citizen. This is a Thomas Jefferson quote, right? And it was expressed, of course, in the French Revolution, but it predates that as well. So, I mean, even the founders of the country understood that, you know, soldiers should be, every soldier is a citizen, every citizen is a soldier. This goes deeper than just having to put on a uniform and go be involved in some type of fighting, right? This is referencing, like, a deeper responsibility that citizens have. to their communities, their cities, their states, their countries, that people have to be bought in

this type of thing, and that these sacrifices are ones that are, you know, people are not sent to on a whim or for corrupt purposes or things like that. That this is a responsibility that soldiers have to fight and that leaders have to send soldiers into worthy battles. and so the military for a long time, you know, this isn't just something that happened in the last three years. I mean, for a long time, the military is kind of, the U.S. military at least, has been deviating

and kind of getting off path with that. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster.

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you might as well publish it. And so I think this is, a lot of this is correctly identifying, like the outcome of the problem, which now is that nobody wants to serve, at least nowhere near the number of people that, you know, have wanted to serve in previous generations, right? and this is not something that you can fix

easily, right? It takes a long time and a lot of cultural effort to create a society that can function with like a legitimate marital sense and it doesn't take very long to destroy it unfortunately and we've largely eroded thousands of years of Western military tradition in the past four, you know, four, five decades, just in the interest of, you know, basically everything that comes out of the Civil

Rights Act and equality movements and things like that. Yeah, I just noticed something that he misspelled Frye Corp. And I pronounced it. I pronounced it improperly. Well, before we get any more into this, I wanted to ask you, I mean, you joined after 9-11. What was the what was the culture then? I mean, you were in infantry, 82nd, everything. I'm assuming the culture would have been a lot different than other divisions. Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is, it's funny. Sometimes I talk to, like, younger guys.

And we kind of live in a, it's kind of a mixed bag because, like, I mean, you remember, America was a different country. in 2000. I mean, in our, you know, in our lifetimes, this country has really,

really changed and in a lot of ways. And so when you, when you tell people, the young guys, you know, like, yeah, you know,

9-11 happened, you know, a lot of us, you know, we were in high school and, you know, saw this unfold. And it was like,

cool, like the, you know, there's a war. So you, you join the army when there's war. if you're teenage male, you know, because that's, you know, that's what people have been doing

since, like, before Christ was on earth. So, you know, it's not like a, you know, it's kind of a no-brainer. And when you explain that, you know, to someone, you know, who's 18, 19 years old today, it's like, well, why? Like, why, why would you do that? There's a lot of sentiment that, like, You know, that's just silly. Why wouldn't anybody do this? Because there's this eroded sense with young people. Ultimately that, you know, America is bad. Everything sucks.

The founding origins of America, the founding origins of Western culture, all this stuff is bad. And it's all fruit from a poison tree. And so why would you inconvenience yourself? Why would you put yourself in harm's way? Why would you do anything other than like vape and play Xbox and, you know, work in Chipotle?

You know, this is, this is like a foreign concept to a lot of young people. And it's, it's unfortunate because the sentiment was not like that, you know, 20 years ago. But the government has very effectively been able to squander all in that goodwill.

I mean, if you look at GY, and the outcomes post 9-11, you know, you and I, we have considerably fewer freedoms today than we did in the year, you know, 2000, right? I mean, in... Well, 2000 was, I mean, you know, in 1992, Francis Fukuyama says, you know, it's the end of history. Liberalism is one.

Right. And so everybody throughout the 90s is living like liberalism is one. Everything's great. You hear people like Bill Maher and you hear people like the Weinsteins. You know, they just want to go back to the 90s because that was that was the end of history. That was the most perfect society we could ever have. And then all of a sudden, you know, terrorist attacks basically turn that on their head. Right.

And people weren't ready for that. People were asleep. I mean, most people slept through. I slept through the 90s. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I was born in the middle.

80s so I was a kid through a lot of it you know I mean my I wasn't you know you're a little older than I am but I wasn't quite looked into it as you would be uh you know but the the sentiment largely uh you know in the year 2000 was just a like you know it's naive but it's like well why would anyone want to attack America like that seems crazy you know what are we doing anybody and you know I know it's naive but you're remember, you know, I'm like 15, 16 at the time and that's the sentiment that's,

you know, common is like, you know, I'm just trying to go to class and like, you know, do shit with my friends. Like, why are these guys flying planes

into the buildings in our cities and things like this? And so a lot of this, you know, really, a lot of this goodwill. And there was a lot of unity post 9-11.

You know, there was a lot of, more of like an overt sense of patriotism and all these types of things. And that really just kind of vanished over the 20 years that followed because we entered into, you know, ground conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan where things really didn't go great for a long time. And, you know, especially in Afghanistan, I mean, we know now there was like a good stretch of that time where there was no actual plan at all, right?

I mean, if you look at the Afghanistan papers from a year or two ago now, they've been out, you know, it was just kind of like, well, you guys just kind of stay over there, you know, and don't, don't cause any bad press. And there's no, like, clear strategic goal at all. And obviously, we saw, you know, this culminates with people falling out of cargo planes and, you know, some, you know, geriatric guy with dementia. making weird commentary about it and, you know, hitting civilians with missiles and, you know, a dozen soldiers getting killed, things like that. So it really ended, uh, you know, poorly. And in that time, the only thing that changed for most Americans was that everything became more expensive. Uh, the government was able to, you know, read every text message and record every phone call and scan every email and, uh, you know, the institutions, like this, obviously this was a,

the institutional capture by the left didn't start with 9-11, but the G-Watt era really was kind of the cherry on top of, you know, this endeavor that had been unfolding for a long time. And now we're at a point where, you know, I mean, I'm not saying anything crazy here, right, but you could get fired for talking this way and mixed company, right? And this is the society that we live in, where you have to worry about losing your 401k

because you don't want like a cross-dressing pedophile shaking his ass in front of your kids. And that's what we got out of GWAT, right? So when you put that all together, you look at this and you go, okay, well, yeah, why would anyone fight? Right? Like, why would you go sign up in the year of 2023,

especially in the wake of GWAT. And he mentions, so there's a couple things he mentions here about the compensation, the pay structure, things like that in the military. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain.

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of living. Like if you're unattached 18, 19 year old guy yeah, you don't, your salary is not anything considerable, but you have no cost of living because your your

housing is taken care of, right? You live in barracks for free and your health insurance is taken care of because you're a soldier and you don't have a water bill or power bill, those types of things. And a lot of your food costs are also offset. So, you know, you're not, you're not, like, wealthy, but there's, you don't, you're not really, like, budgeting, right? Like, all your core expenses are taken care of. And for a lot of guys, the money that you make is just kind of like spending money.

So when you, uh, like in, in fairness, when you stack that up, um, it's not like all in your compensation is, is halfway all right. I mean, it's not, not great. I'm not saying that like, you know, this is where people go to get wealthy. but you're not necessarily like working poor, right? So the question of whether this advances your career, I think it goes deeper than just like just your yearly salary. It goes into what does this do, right? Like what does college do for you? Like showing, getting a four-year degree does not necessarily indicate that you're an expert at anything.

In fact, usually it's not a reliable. indicator of that at all. But it does show that you have four years where you can play the game, go through the song and dance, you have enough social skills that you can navigate this for four years without getting kicked out of something. And you basically know how to play nice, right? Like you get out of a four-year degree.

And unless you're in something that's very high tier, like a good STEM program or something, I mean, getting out of a four-year degree with like a general, like a degree in business or something just means that you're able to kind of interact socially as needed and that you're able to do some degree of independent

work. You know, so that in and of itself is in what opens doors for you. The social proof, the proof of concept is what opens doors for you. And in an era where like military service might count for something, that's why it was

important to be in the military, right? It was like, okay, when I was 18 to whenever, 22, 25, you know, I successfully served in the military, and that shows that socially, like, this is a safe bet to offer this person a job or a position of responsibility, or, you know, that they might be a little bit more favorable choice than somebody who stayed at home during, you know, any event. And this isn't specific to G-W. This is, you know, service in the military historically. So it is true, like the dollar amount compensation is not anything crazy, but you're still relatively taken care of.

It's just that it doesn't open the same types of doors for you now that it may have 60 years ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago. So that's, you know, some of the change. And so he mentions increasing, like, the pay. And that's not a bad thing. Like that it's not going to hurt, right? But that in and of itself, I don't think is the heart of the matter. I don't think that's the essence of why the U.S. military has this credibility problem at the moment, and it has this recruiting crisis at the moment.

I want to ask you this, ask your opinion on this. Prussia was always described as a military with a government. Is it getting to the point that a modern state is going to be able to exist without with only having a all-volunteer force? If you ask the U.S. Army War College, the answer is no. Right? like they actually published an article this week. I read it this morning.

And they're, of course, discussing this in the context of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. And it's couched in the idea of a large-scale combat operation. And the answer basically is no. They're saying that if you look at 20 years of G-Y, produced roughly 50,000 casualties between dead and injured, and, you know, this would be like two weeks of large-scale combat operations against a Western Army. And there's very low levels in the, what's called the IRR, it's individual ready reserve. This is, I'll give just a quick background for anyone who's not familiar with this.

the shortest term of service that you can have for the military is eight years. Now, you don't have to do all eight years on active duty. So for example, if you go down to the recruiter's office and you sign up for a four-year contract in the U.S. Army, what you're actually signing up for is four years of active duty and four years of what's called IRR or individual ready reserve, which means it you get out of the army and you can go to work, you don't go, you don't wear a uniform, you're basically a normal civilian.

However, they can always call you and say, hey, bud, you got to come back. And they can do that for four years after you got out, right? And it's, you'll hear it referred to as a backdoor draft sometimes. And this

was a common thing. You saw a lot of this during Iraq and Afghanistan where guys would do a tour, they would get out of the military. Nine months later, they'd get a letter in the mail that says, hey, you're surprised, you're coming back. And you need to go report here, and you're going to Afghanistan for nine months or something. And, you know, it's not popular.

Of course, people don't like dealing with it. But the IRL is like our last reserve, right? You have active duty, and then you have like National Guard and Reserve units. And then you have IRA, which is kind of like, calling up the guys who are now out of shape and binge drinking and not wanting to go back, but they still technically have this obligation. So the number of soldiers in IRR is also historically low.

So not only is the military way off, I mean, you're talking like 15%, 25% for some recent years in their recruiting goals, but the IRR levels are also very low. And so they're saying that like, Yeah, if we're in a large-scale combat operation where the military is looking at 50,000 casualties in a short period of time, we don't have the ability to sustain that for any length of time. We cannot put fresh bodies through trade-doc fast enough to get them up to the line. And so this is basically just not something that we could really do right now.

And again, this is in the context of like a war similar to the Ukraine and Russia conflict. the war college paper they refer to this as a strategic inflection point if I'm remembering it correctly meaning that their opinion is that the military should look at this

take a deep assessment and say well hang on we might have like a systemic problem here where we really couldn't play in a war like this right now and you know there's a lot of factors that go into that the military really really is extraordinarily small.

A lot of people, you know, there's like a trillion memes about the American defense budget and, you know, how the government just gives everything to the military and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is that that's not true. Like that's not the case.

So in the 12th, tweet, he says there's 1.3 million total U.S. military personnel, and that's accurate. There's 330 million people in the country. Okay. So right away, just at face value, that is not anything impressive. But when you drill down on the numbers of this, as of 2021 and these numbers haven't shifted significantly since then but as of 2021 the active duty army force was about

482,000 people and the active duty Marine Corps force was about 180,000 people okay so you're talking about less than 700,000 people that are active duty army or Marine Corps. Now the The Navy has about 350,000 people.

Same with the National Guard, a little bit less for Air Force active duty. But the important thing to understand here is that of Army active duty and marine active duty, only about 15% of that force is infantry. Okay. And infantry is, you know, that's your trigger pullers.

That's the guys who, those are frontline combat jobs. Okay. So you're talking, you're actually really not talking about a large number at all and I looked into this as of 2019

the number of soldiers between the rank of E1 and E4 so that's your lower enlisted soldiers that's just grunts okay the number of grunts that's in the army the MOS is an 11 Bravo

so the number of 11B E1 through E4 can you guess it's 19,820 people. Holy crap. So there's 330 million people in America and there's 20,000 young guys with rifles who are just regular GI Joe's. Wow.

I mean, so the money that goes into the government's budget, of course, is large, but even that is not what, people think it is compared to the overall federal budget. But like I said, I mean, you're 20,000 lower enlisted guys. What's that going to do you against a place like China? I think I've heard that China has, China could mobilize quickly, almost as many soldiers as our population. Right.

I'm sure, you know, now the, you know, the Chinese question, you know, so a little outside of the scope, but there's some things to consider. I mean, they don't have the force projection ability. Right. I mean, I'm not scared of China. China, I'm, believe me, I'm so well studied in China that like the only thing about China that I ever worry about is, you know, manufacturing and trade, things like that. Yeah. Yeah. yeah right

but the the you know my point with this is that you can't expect 20,000 guys to deal with a near peer adversary right like like having having 20,000 guys

who are low level grunts you you can't control the globe with that right you just can't and it's obvious that foreign policy is to control the globe, right? Like, I'm not, you know, I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just saying that's the reality of the situation.

That's not hyperbole. That is their goal. Right. Right. So now, of course, you know, this is 20,000 lower enlisted guys. There's, you know, well above that in terms of NCOs and officers to matchments and things like that. So even still, if you're looking at

482,000 active duty army and 180,000 active duty Marines, and 15% of that is infantry, you're still kind of in like the low six figures of actual grunts, right?

And this is not a large number compared A to our population, but B, to our goals in terms of force projection, right? It's just not enough to get the job done when you're looking at a conflict similar to Ukraine and Russia, right?

Like, notice, I'm not talking about the Navy in this. I'm not talking about the Air Force. I'm not talking about the Air National Guard or, you know, fucking space force. I'm talking about active duty, army, and infantry, like combat arms, because this is kind of the context of today's concern is fighting a war similar to Ukraine versus Russia, where you're seeing

kind of a return to almost more traditional conventional style ground war between uniformed armies who are having a hard time getting the one up on each other. And a lot of this just turns into guys shooting each other from five feet away in trenches. You're going to need more than 100,100,000, guys. if you're going to win a war like that and still project force around the globe.

And so this is a reality that the U.S. is, at least some parts of the government are starting to look at and go, okay, that's not good, right? Like, this is, this is actually a pretty serious problem. And the way they're trying to fix it is the worst possible way. He mentions, he says, and then the army went woke. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives,

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Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Wokeness is toxic to the Army, not just because of the values clash with most ordering recruits, but it places front and center of the entire dynamic that makes the military such an awful career path. So he's mostly correct on this. And as with anything else

that the federal government does, their solution for it, at least in recent years, is to just make it woke, just make it more diverse, get some people who shouldn't be there in there, right? Like let's get some women

in pregnancy flight suits and pregnancy body armor. Let's get some cross dressers out in the trenches. These are things that only an idiot would think is a good idea or someone who would like to dismantle Western civilization

or both. You know, it's not mutually exclusive. But these are bad ideas. These are, this will not rejuvenate the military. This will not improve the situation with recruiting because almost definitionally

it cannot. There's just, there's no way that this can happen. And I remember one of the big points of contention when I was getting out of the army. You know, we did this deployment. We were there for 12 months

in Iraq and then shortly before we came home we got told it's actually going to be 15 months. We had 90 days added on. Some of you remember that. It's the troop surge in 2016. and so what happens with this is, you know, a lot of guys on these three, four-year contracts, you're going to be getting out soon, right?

Like if you sign a three-year-four-year agreement and it takes you, you know, a few months to get through basic training and jump school and things like that, you spend a little time in your unit, you go to JRTC, you go overseas for 15 months. You know, there's actually not that much time left on your contract when you come home. and especially when you get extended. So we had a lot of guys that were stop lost, is what it's referred to as. Again, some of you who are old enough to remember that from GWAT,

that means that you're in the military and your contract expires while you're like overseas. So you're in Iraq and it's the last day that you are technically supposed to be in the army, but surprise you're going to be there until the unit comes back. and then you're going to be there for a few months while you're out processing and clearing your unit and all this type of thing. And so, you know, we get back from Iraq and the Army at the time. It was called PLDC. It's, I'm sure the name has changed since then, but it's basically there's the professional leadership development course or the Warriors Leadership course.

It's the training course that you go to when you become an NCO, when you become a sergeant. And every time you break up in the Army, I don't know if it's like this in other branches, I would imagine that it's similar. But in the Army, every time you gain a stripe once you're an NCO, there's some type of school that you go to. When I was in, it was PLDC, B-Nock, A-K, and so on and so forth. So, like, you go from a sergeant to a staff sergeant, a sergeant, start at first class, so on and so. And this is like a professional course. And so I had become an NCO in Iraq. I basically taken a promotion in country.

And so I came home. I was getting out of the army in like four or five months. And, you know, we all got called down to like the Italian classroom. And, you know, you get a new sergeant major and a new battalion commander. They're shot out of a cannon about, all right, this is what we're doing before the next deployment. You know, everybody's going to PLDC, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, nobody, a lot of the people in the room really shouldn't go to this because they're not supposed to be there that day, right? Or they're in the process of, like, trying to, like, buy a house back home or, or, you know, see their kids or all this type of stuff.

You know, remember, these are guys who just spent 15 months in, like, you know, actual combat during some of the worst times in Iraq. So you get home and you, you know, you kind of have shit to do. And this is only a three week course, but, you know, you're there all day. You stay at PLDC. You're not, you're not home at night. And it's like a form where, uh, you know, basically like a non-combat overweight female soldiers go to like, give like whiteboard classes about, you know, how to how to perform like a near ambush or things like that. And these are the things that make you hate the army, right? Because it's like, well, like this is actually my job. I'm in the infantry. I don't need the chick from the supply unit

trying to explain to us how to conduct an ambush. But that's what the army once done, because to the army, you need to be having, you know, women in these spaces or taking these leadership roles, right? And these are like resume bullet points on these people's NCOERs. And so the whole thing is like a, it's kind of a goat rope because it's obvious that they don't care about doing what's right, which is, you know, these guys who got held over or are getting out soon, probably need a little bit of time to get like their affairs straight before they transition out to, you know, back to the civilian life,

uh, you know, they're really focused on getting these bullet points for resumes and for sake of diversity and, you know, this type of thing. And so, again,

this is in, uh, this is in 2008. So this was kind of before, uh, the stuff got as bad as it was now. Like this is, this has been a problem.

It's been been brewing in the military. for a long time, right? Like, this is something that has reduced combat efficacy for, for everyone. And a lot of, a lot of the things that the Army has done are moving in the wrong direction, right? You don't fix recruiting for a military by making it easier or by making it, you know, a more inclusive environment for people who can't run as fast or can't do as many push-ups can't shoot their rifles as well, right? This is the exact opposite of how you would develop a military.

In fact, it's precisely how you would ruin a military, which is the most frustrating part of this. Because it's to people who have like any degree of common sense, of course you would say, well, yeah, that would be a ridiculous thing to do to the army? Like, why would you want a military that prioritizes fitting in the guys who don't run as fast or don't shoot as well or can't do as many pushups or emotionally or not rugged or, you know,

or just in it for the money or any of these things, right? Like these are bad ideas when you're trying to create a military. And especially if you're trying, if culturally what you're trying to do is create a military that is relatively small that can do more, that can punch above its weight, right? Like if you if you're building the Chinese military, then yeah, you know, you just need any person who's, you know, old enough to eat a fucking, you know, crab out of a mud puddle can be in the military. But this is not the case if what you're trying to do is carry on like a Western tradition of martial policy, right? It doesn't make sense. and this is the position that the Army currently finds itself in,

which is that the people you would want to be in the military are not going to join the military because they have almost deliberately ruined the military by turning it into a HR department that has machine guns instead of a force that's really good at killing a lot of bad guys. What is your take on people's opinion that one of the reasons, and it's mentioned here, about turning the military inside on on the citizenry here what's your opinion on you know the whole

bio leninism take that basically you're not really staffing the military with the the best people but people that you know will be loyal to your regime the trannies and the freaks right yeah the obviously for any leader who plans to stay in office the military being politically reliable is vital, right? This is not something that

is negotiable. If you're the Biden administration or not even just the Biden administration, but any administration that has an agenda that is deeply and incisively counter to long held cultural beliefs of the people over whom you were governing,

you kind of have to get rid of the true believers from the military and bring in people who will be loyal to you, right? Like this is, like I mentioned earlier, you get free healthcare in the military. And that's really great for people who have like anxiety problems, they change genders, they, you know.

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Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Have, you know, pet problems that, you know, constantly require attention from some type of medical professional. Like, these are high-maintenance individuals who,

are a drain on society who do not contribute anything especially in a Marshall purpose but they will vote for you no matter what right like if you if you look at like the trans thing is a perfect example of this

because you know you're seeing ads you're seeing recruiting ads on social media from the army of these pudgy overweight like weird fetid you know, guys who are too old to be there talking about how, whatever, they're really women

or they transit, you know, the whole nine yards. And however one of their unit loves them and, you know, the Army's a great place to be if you're like them. And, you know, of course, because the government will pay to either remove their penis or put a fake penis on them and then it will give them a waiver that says you never have to deploy into combat. Right? Like the current arrangement for trans people in the military is you basically have a

permanent waiver system where you're non-deployable. You know, which is insane. Like if you went back at any point in history and you told, you know, Caesar or Alexander or anybody that you need to hire some guys who can't fight and they're also going to be a freak show that needs to move with your front line troops

everywhere they go. You know, they just want to cut your head off and for wasting their time. Like this is an insane concept. I mean, it is obvious that that's the end goal, right? But I don't think, like America and, America specifically is kind of a unique example where if you're doing a good job as an head of state,

right like if you're a president who even even somewhat uh takes into account uh the broader population's well-being you really don't have to worry about the military not being politically reliable because traditionally people who serve in the military in america are relatively uh extremely patriotic and uh loyal to the concept of civilian governments governance of a military um you know this is again this is this is kind of a it's unique to America in this day and age, but it's not a unique concept to Western militaries. If you're doing what you should be doing as a leader,

you don't really have to worry about the military, you know, as a threat, right? But if you're acting, if you're dealing with impropriety, corruption, you're going against, you know, the broader sentiment of the productive, elements of society, then of course you have a real problem. And so, yeah, I mean, there is some element of that. But the real problem, of course, is that we have enemies like potentially China, potentially Russia, potentially any number of places where if we want to maintain this

what is perceived as like a U.S. hegemony on things, we cannot continue at this rate, right? Like the military cannot miss its recruiting goals by 25% every year. The military cannot fill its lower end, like it's officer to core with people who can't see combat, people who do not want to deploy, people who do not believe in these military concepts. These are people who, you know,

these belong in the HR department. Chase Bank. These people don't belong in like an artillery unit, right? And so you can only get so much. Like, yeah, maybe they're a little bit more politically reliable to you. But the second you have an actual engagement with a modern military, you are going to

pay for this 100 times over and it's not something that you're guaranteed to come back from. Like, there's no do-overs with this stuff most of the time. So it's I think that is what they're doing, but they're really, really running a risk. like an existential risk by doing it. It really seems like if that were to happen,

and I hope it's an unlikely scenario that there would be enough people who, you know, like yourself, who actually know how to handle themselves, for lack of a better term, no Fed posting, that could just turn an attack on people like that. just put them down.

Yeah, there's, you know, I mean, these things, uh, it's not, you know, it's not fun to talk about. Like, I don't like, you know, talking this way. You know what I mean? Like this is not. No one does. We just, I mean, come on. We know.

Right. We've talked about this. We've hung out. Yeah. All we want to do, we're like literally people that want to grill. Yeah. In a lot of ways, you know, this, this is, uh, yeah, it's brutal. And this, this stuff, uh,

you know, where he's talking about, you know, obviously there's a disincentive. He says that not only are young men enticed to join the military out of knowledge that they're wasting years or basically that, you know, their genders, can color, sexual orientation, things like this is going to be used against them. This is, like, this is true, but it's uniquely true in a military sense, right? like the people who join the military, especially people who join the military voluntarily, do not want to be made to feel,

feel like they are or are perceived as criminals or like victims of some type of broader system, right? This is just a simple truth about the psychology of this. No one, you know, no one wants to do anything that involves some type of competitive achievement, you know, if this is going to be the sentiment, right? Like, no one would play high school football if they got perceived as bad guys who were, like, somehow victims of, you know, their own flawed way of thinking, right? This is the opposite of the culture you have to foster if you do want to have a military that's effective.

This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Sprinker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing.

Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. And it's somewhat ironic because one of the timeless themes of famous militaries through history is actually egalitarianism. Like this is, it sounds counter to any,

any right wing thought. But this is, this is kind of, a lot of people listening you've probably heard the expression, especially if they were in the service, the expression of never above you, never below you, always beside you. And that's kind of a mantra in a lot of units and a lot of military

thought, which is that everyone who's there is equal, right? And it's the old cliche about being equally worthless and everybody, you know, equally sucks and all this type of stuff. But there's a lot of truth to this because in a military context, the idea of egalitarianism is one where everyone is equally contributing and equally sacrificing rather than equally consuming something or equally receiving a perk or a handout, right?

Military egalitarianism involves a equal willingness to shoulder a burden, a right to suffer, and it's very different from the liberal thought about egalitarianism as a right to enjoy a privilege or a right to be included in something. Okay, so like this is kind of like, this is why it's a bad idea to give everyone a right to vote, right, because not everyone's going to see it as a duty. You know what I mean? This is a theme that comes up in philosophy since day one. when you're talking about something like democracy,

is why would you give everyone a right to vote if they're not invested in good faith outcomes and some type of fiduciary obligation or civic obligation, right? So military egalitarianism is critical. You have to create an environment, culture, and a spree to core that it hinders on some type of egalitarianism in a fighting unit or you're not going to be effective

because people will not fight. Like an army fights you know on its heart. So there is no there's no way to create a rifle company that works

if you're telling people that the lazy people, the slow people, the weaklings, the people who can't shoot, the people who are too dumb to read a map, these are the people that you have to take with you. You cannot create that environment and create a rifle company that is effective. Okay.

And that's not, again, that's not new. This is something that you see written about in warfare for thousands of years. Okay. Like if you, like I went through because I was thinking about this today, I grabbed carnage and culture. and here's two quotes and this is interesting and I highlighted these because there's such a long span of time between this okay so from carnage and culture that's Victor David Hanson's book or Davis Hanson's book

and he's talking about like the march of the 10,000 xenophon he says we're out to the Mediterranean with philosophers and students of rhetoric march and file alongside cutthroats to crash headlong into enemy's flesh. Where else would every man under arms feel equal to anyone else in the army? Or at least see himself as free and in control of his own destiny. And he's talking about the fact that this Greek mercenary army was composed of low-lifes and scumbags

mixed in with people from noble families and aristocratic backgrounds and that they were all committed to one another with a sense of discipline, egalitarianism and exclusivity, and they were able to basically fight their way back from halfway across the world and through hostile territory the whole time. Now, prepare this,

you have Stephen Ambrose in the introduction to parachute infantry. That's David Kenyon Webster's book. He's describing him. Webster, he was a literature major at Harvard, but in World War II, he joined the infantry, 1001st, Airborne. And Stephen Ambrose says, Webster was a man of books and libraries, a reader and a writer, thrown into an intimate and life-dependent relationship with ill-educated hillbillies,

southern farmers, coal miners, lumbermen, fishermen, and other typical paratrooper enlisted men. In short, with a group of men with whom he had nothing in common, he would not have particularly liked or disliked them in civilian life. He just would not have known them. Yet it was among this unlikely group of men that Webster found his closest friendships and enjoyed most thoroughly the sense of identification with others. Now, these are about 2,400 years apart. And you're seeing this theme recurring, this concept that people from different backgrounds

and different walks of life can be effective. these are both militaries that, one, decisively, they can be effective if they view themselves as contributing equally and part of like this tight-knit unit where everyone belongs because everyone can carry their weight. Okay. Married to this is this idea that what you're doing is a challenge to yourself, right? Like the desire to, and, you know, other people have written about this. This is also a sentiment that I share because when 9-11 happened, I mean,

I mean, if I'm being honest, a big draw of this wasn't necessarily like, oh man, 9-11 happened. I'm going to join the military because, just because of 9-11, you know, a lot of that was, hey, do I have what it takes to fight in a war like this? Can I shoulder the same burden? A lot of people who came before me have shouldered, right? and I just happened to be at the right age in a country, you know, on earth that was in that situation. And so I joined and a lot of guys that were in the army peeled to varying degrees similar to this. David Blavia writes about this.

I mean, he says, we endure for two reasons. First, there's a nobility and purpose in our lives. We are America's warrior class. We protect and we avenge. Second, every moment in the infantry is a test. If we measure up to the worst days such as this one, it proves we stand to breed apart from all other men. This is the concept that you see time and time again.

This has to be there. This cannot be in a military and still be a top tier military that is better than other militaries in the world. There's just no way around the stuff. It's baked in. You can't change the recipe. there's just no way around it, right?

So this, you see this, like, if you look at the military and you look at the jobs in the military, the Army might have like a 25% miss from its recruiting goals, but there are units in the Army that don't have this problem, right? Like, there's never a shortage of guys who want to go be a Navy SEAL. There's never a shortage of guys who want to go be an Army ranger. Does that make sense? Do you understand where I'm coming from with that? Like there's always going to be guys.

You will always have enough guys in a Western society, especially in a country if you're running it well, who want to step up and take on some type of challenge. But if what you're offering, if you're what you're watering down in the military is not having to take a PT test, you know, a bunch of walking stomachs, just bumbling around through the day,

vaping and buying Dodge Chargers, then you're going to lose, right? you have to offer young people, and specifically young men, a challenge to themselves, a worthy purpose to pursue some environment that's going to be dependent on meritocracy, like genuine meritocracy, and it will foster camaraderie. And this has to be something that they enter into voluntarily, right? Like this is where I disagree with the concept of, you know, draft and conscription and things like this. I understand that as like a civilization saving policy, but all other things being equal, it's best to avoid that type of thing in my opinion,

because you want people who want to be there, right? You have to take people who want to be there and you have to give them a challenge and they have to be led well and they have to have a purpose. And these are things that the military is not doing right now and has been doing less and less and less of for honestly for generation. Yeah, it seems that if the only thing, that soldiers are bonding over is their their trans status or their gender status, something like that.

Sure. That's not going to, there's going to be no cohesion when it comes to actually pulling a trigger. I mean, or going into battle together. I mean, what there's, what's the camaraderie there?

I mean, most of these people are, have bought into a trend. and they've made this trend their identity. Right. And so it goes out of window. Right. Exactly. And there's, you know, I don't know.

I mean, like I said, I got out of the Army in 2008. So it's basically ancient history. I'm sure that there are. This episode is brought to you by Sprecker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need. explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, Sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio.

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Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Quality young people in the Army today, I'm sure that there are still plenty of guys who are very capable. But, you know, I think it's less and less. And I think that the environment as a whole is less and less conducive to those types of things. and you can only this can only be degraded so far before it's not effective at all

right? Like this isn't something that's just you know ironically it's binary. It can't be non-binary, right? Like the military is either functioning, specifically the infantry is either functioning or it's not right. It's either going to win

in a kinetic engagement or it's not And once you cross a line where there's X percentage of people who don't really want to be there or X percentage of people who can't actually hack it, right? Like even on a good day, this is not a job that just anybody can do, right? Like it's not the most difficult thing in the world. But, you know, if you're 18, like, I mean, when I joined, you know, you have to be clean. You have to be able to graduate high school. You can't have a criminal record, you know, for the most part. you can't, you know, have like face tattoos or, you know, you got a plastic drug test.

You know, you physically, you can't have any real ailments. And, you know, to get into better units, you have to be, you know, be physically capable. So even on a good day, this is not something like just any 17th year old guy is going to be able to jump into. Like the percentage of young people who are generically eligible for military service is just not high. Right. Everyone's overweight or sick, mentally, some type of unwell, either fake or imagined. And so it's really not great. And I'm sure, you know, there's probably some zoomers out there that are that are really good at being in the infantry. Okay. And I hope there are because there's not a lot of them, right? Like we discussed, there's about 20,000 of these guys. But it doesn't take a lot to fuck that up. Like it, it,

doesn't take a lot of like women being in a rifle platoon for the rifle platoon to stop working as a rifle platoon. Okay. It takes like exactly one. And it's the same for, you know, trans people, people who can't meet the PT standards, people who cognitively can't meet the minimum requirements. You know, I mean, this is like, it's kind of a trope that the infantry is, you know, the crayon eaters and it's, it's just grunts and stuff like that.

and some of that's true, like some of the dumbest motherfuckers I've ever met in my life were in the infantry with me. However, a lot of the smartest people I've ever met were too. And you kind of have to have a couple

brain cells to rub together to be effective, especially in a leadership position. And this is just, this is just something that you're really, really poisoning the well by reducing these standards,

flooding these places with people who shouldn't be there. And I don't even mean that in like an edgy, like meamy kind of way about people who shouldn't be there. They could go do something else, right? I'm not saying that to be a dick. I'm saying that because that's just the reality. Like you cannot win a war if your commanding officer is a 36 year old overweight trans person. You can't do it. I'm sorry. It's not possible. That will not happen. There's just no way around it. Okay. And so, again, I'm not saying it to sound like a doomer or be blackpilled or say this is like an irreversible

problem or like it's over or something like that. These are just realities that have to be confronted. And if you don't confront these realities as a culture and as a society, as a military, you will stop being affected at the end. You will, you will lose. Like this is what will happen. Like you will lose. It's going to take some type of crushing defeat for people to sober up and realize that, you know, this isn't Nerf, right? Like, when you send guys into some type of kinetic engagement, like, if you send a platoon into ground combat and the PL is like a pudgy 29-year-old guy with a diaper fetish, you know, you're going to have 38, like, American dudes getting dragged through the streets because they're all going to be dead. And that's what it's

going to take to wake the country up from this stuff. There's just no way around it. And again, I don't, I don't like talking that way. I mean, I have kids. I have a son who's interested in the army. I mean, this is what comes natural to boys. This is not the way I want the things to be. It just, it just kind of is though, right? And if we don't as a society, wake up to this stuff and say, hey, look, like, you can even keep the woke stuff, right? You could, you could keep this stuff in the university. You could keep the stuff in the HR departments. You cannot let it come into the military. The parts that are in the military need to be remote from the military.

This needs to be something that's understood as, hey, look, this is just not where this stuff goes. Now, I don't know if that's possible socially, right? Like, the people who believe these things believe that these are real concerns, right? Like, there are true believers, like in the Biden administration and the broader progressive movement. A lot of this, there are a lot of people there who, you know, they're just doing this out of corruption. and they know that if they get people who are politically reliable and they head up certain agendas, then they're going to, you know, get a board seat on an NGO somewhere or like a sinecure job or something like that. Those people are less dangerous than the people who are genuine believers.

Like there are people in positions of power who actually think that it would be really good to have a bunch of fat asses and weirdos on a rifle company. And those are the people that they need to be removed from power. and this thing needs to be reversed or else, you know, God forbid when the day comes, and it will come. You can't have, you know,

a dominant country, right? And never have someone step up to check you on that. That's the history of the world. Like, there's no way around it. Like, that day will come and we have to be prepared for that eventuality. And we're not on track to face it right now.

Let's send it right there. because I don't think we're going to come up with an answer for it other than the obvious. And I think you pretty much hit the points that need to be hit about this. And that's why I asked you to come on because I know that this is something you follow. You're reading war college stuff for just to research for yourself. So I couldn't think of a better person. us, you know, we know each other. So, um, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks, Pete. It's always always a pleasure. Yeah, and quickly remind everybody about N-B-B-L-P-R-O-C-P-P-R-E-S-N-Blockpress.com.

Again, it's weekly newsletter, occasional podcast. Go sign up, subscribe. All right, man. I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Lee. For sure.