Pentagon's 'woke warriors' called 'recipe for disaster'

FPI / June 23, 2021

The "wokeism" that has infected Team Biden's Pentagon is more in line with communist China than those who made the U.S. military the world's most formidable force for freedom.

That is the view of the only conservative serving on the newly-formed Countering Extremism Working Group (CEWG).

"Today’s Department of Defense appears to be distracted from its national defense mission," Mike Berry noted in a June 19 analysis for the Washington Examiner. "Media commentators and service members alike have lamented the military’s drift toward becoming a testing ground for social policy experimentation."

The Biden government, Berry noted, is now monitoring the social media activity of military personnel "in order to ensure service members don’t post, share, or like something 'extreme.' If this sounds eerily familiar, it’s because China has been doing it for years."

That the Pentagon has fully embraced "wokeism" should "alarm everyone," wrote Berry, who is general counsel at First Liberty Institute and a former active duty U.S. Marine Corps officer.

Joe Biden "recently declared that white supremacy poses the greatest threat to America’s national security," Berry noted. "Instead of monitoring external threats, the Pentagon is on a mission to identify and remove whomever it labels as extremists from America’s armed forces. Ironically, the CEWG has yet to define what it means by 'extremism.' Extremism is usually defined as the threat or use of violence to achieve an ideological agenda. But the Pentagon is now poised to expand upon that definition to include constitutionally protected speech."

What the Pentagon should be doing, Berry noted, is reinforcing the nation's "young men and women what makes America exceptional. The values that drove me to join the Marine Corps many years ago were love of country, pride in service, and respect for selfless service and sacrifice. Those are the timeless principles upon which America was built. Or so I thought. Sadly, adherence to those principles is more likely to get me and others labeled as extremists and kicked out of today’s military."

Several years ago, Berry added, the Department of Defense produced a document that labeled those who believe in "states' rights, individual liberties, and how to make the world a better place" as potential extremists.

"Apparently, I was mistaken for thinking those were the things I was defending as a Marine," Berry wrote. "And despite data showing that religious people are the most likely to serve, we are now declaring them undesirable extremists."

Team Biden's transformation of the U.S. military into a bunch of "wokeness warriors" is "a recipe for disaster," Berry wrote. "America has real enemies who seek to harm us, and those enemies are likely giddy with every woke pronouncement that America will continue to pour yet more valuable time, energy, and resources into its cold civil war."

Free Press International