Now, it’s Elon Musk versus the Pentagon.
The mega-billionaire has taken on the challenges of privatizing space travel and revolutionizing electric vehicle production upped the ante over the weekend with a Twitter post aimed directly at the United States Defense Department.
And it was a direct hit.
Musk was responding to an @DeptofDefense tweet Saturday morning, where the department extolled its own commitment to woke priorities and promoting its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Diversity is a strategic imperative critical to mission readiness and accomplishment. We were on site for the 2023 inaugural @DoD_ODEI Summit as DEIA experts led forums to advance the DEIA and DoD mission — because our people matter. pic.twitter.com/VX42BC1Imo
— Department of Defense (@DeptofDefense) February 18, 2023
“Diversity is a strategic imperative critical to mission readiness and accomplishment,” the post stated. “We were on site for the 2023 inaugural @DoD_ODEI Summit as DEIA experts led forums to advance the DEIA and DoD mission — because our people matter.”
The wording is a perfect example of government in the Biden administration, and the military under the “leadership” of Biden administration Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff led by Army Gen. Mark Milley.
It blathers leftist buzzwords while imitating military jargon (“strategic imperative”) and projecting the traditional can-do spirit of the American military.
Then it ends with a plaintive line that sounds like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at her accusatory-defensive worst: “because our people matter.”
It’s apparently lost on the Defense Department’s social media squad that no sane American has ever questioned whether the military’s people “matter.”
The real question is what matters to the Defense Department under President Joe Biden’s administration, which has so far been bookended by the twin humiliations of the disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the equally distasteful handling of a Chinese spy balloon in 2023.
In his Twitter response, Musk had the answer — or what should be the answer:
Your strategic imperative is defending the United States
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 19, 2023
“Your strategic imperative is defending the United States,” he wrote.
It’s a simple sentence and to the point. It put the Defense Department leadership decisively in its place — as a military organization with the single, profound responsibility of protecting the physical safety of Americans. And it had the benefit of being resoundingly true.
It might come as a surprise to the insanely left of American politics — currently in control of the Democratic Party — that the military does not exist to provide taxpayer-funded surgery for men who want to be women. It is not some sort of spectacularly large affirmative-action program whose function is to promote members to power based on their skin color.
Many Americans could be forgiven for misunderstanding that during the Biden presidency, where, as the Washington Examiner reported in March 2021, one of Biden’s first executive orders would enable service members and veterans to obtain “gender reassignment” surgery.
They could be forgiven for forgetting it at a time when the leading names in the military seem determined to prove that American society is simply ridden with racism and other transgressions of the soul (not to mention abetting “climate change”).
As former President Donald Trump understood, the military exists to defend the country from threats abroad, and to project its strength to advance American interests around the globe.
It does not exist to advance the left-wing fantasies of the ever-more-left-wing fabulist in the Oval Office.
And the responses to Musk’s tweets showed plenty of others understand it, too.
The Left seeks to turn our military into an enforcement arm of the “Party.”
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) February 19, 2023
They will divide the military based on pronouns and race.
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) February 19, 2023
America depends on our Military.
To win wars. To kill. To defeat enemies and protect Freedom.
Have you seen America’s
Commander in Chief of all Armed Forces? Including the balloon force?
He has a corvette.
— Edsel Robbins (@edsel_robbins) February 19, 2023
The real rub here is that the military is one of the most institutions of American life — it was officially desegrated in 1948 by an executive order from then-President Harry Truman (the last decent Democrat to hold the job).
And while it’s surely not without racial tensions — no place on earth that includes human beings is — it’s an organization that has to prize merit over extraneous qualities. The idea of death at the hands of an enemy or a friend concentrates the mind.
But for the liberals in the Age of Progressive Ascendancy, all things must bow to the gods of diversity, equity and inclusion.
And that includes an American military that under the current president has been disgraced abroad and at home by its civilian leadership in the White House and its uniformed leadership in the Pentagon.
It needs an Elon Musk-style vision to get its priorities straight — and to be put back in its place of honor in American life.
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