https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-bud-light-military?
Thus opens the foundational epic of European civilization.
Achilles is angry because his woman, Briseis, has been appropriated by Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks. He expresses this discontent by going on strike. While the rest of the Greek army fights and dies outside the walls of Troy, Achilles lounges in his tent, content to sit out the combat until Agamemnon comes to his senses and returns his war bride. If Achilles were simply any other warm body with a spear, this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but he is Achilles – the greatest warrior of the Heroic Age. Without him, the Greeks are at a severe disadvantage. Achilles’ petulance is therefore a problem for Agamemnon.
The lesson is hardly a subtle one. Kings and generals need to keep their soldiers happy. They especially need to keep their best soldiers happy. If they don’t – for instance, by taking their women from them – morale will suffer, and they may well find themselves without the crucial support of their warriors when it most matters.
Washington seems to have missed that lesson, and now, they’re paying the price.
For the last decade they have been relentlessly and mercilessly whipping American whites: defaming them as racists, mocking their intelligence and manliness, tearing down their statues, erasing the names of their ancestral heroes, replacing their fictional archetypes with diverse doppelgangers in the media, disadvantaging them in education and employment, demanding that they attend racial struggle sessions. The list of outrages and humiliations is long and all too familiar, permeating as it does every one of our institutions.
But now, the Empire of Lies faces a problem.
War has returned to the world. History, its rumoured demise notwithstanding, once again stalks the land. Russia mauls the Ukraine; Israel is beset with enemies; the Empire’s influence in Africa frays by the day; China salivates over Taiwan.
Meanwhile the American domestic economy, long since hollowed out by the extractive rent-seeking of financial parasites, lurches from one crisis to the next. The Great Satan remains powerful, for the present, but the young bucks can scent that the silverback is not what he used to be. Their provocations increase in daring and intensity. If they aren’t slapped down, their boldness will only increase.
The criminal regime that has insinuated itself into the halls of American power is running against a clock. They must have a war to cover the slow collapse of their fake economy. They must have a war to prevent rival regimes from displacing their American golem. But their golem is crumbling. Therefore they must have a war sooner rather than later, because with every moment of delay America becomes weaker, while China and Russia become stronger.
Their problem is that no one wants to fight for them.
The core warrior population of America has always been the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian regions, the good ol’ boys of the South, and the farm boys of the Midwest. Hillbillies and rednecks, in other words. Many families from these areas have multi-generational traditions of service. Dad served in Vietnam, Grampa in WWII, Great-Grandpa in the Great War, and Great-Grandpa’s Pappy fought under Lee in the War of Northern Aggression.
These are precisely the white populations that have been singled out for the most unrelenting and vicious racial abuse over the last several decades. They are the one group that it’s okay to defame in the media, depicted as ignorant, bigoted, backwards, and inbred. The people running Hollywood seem to have a special disgust for them. For generations they have born this with a sort of stoic good cheer, accepting their role as the heel in the great kayfabe of American political drama even as they shouldered a disproportionate burden of blood, tears, and sweat in America’s imperial wars.
The events of the last two decades seem to have put an end to that. It wasn’t just the psychotic frenzy of race communism that gripped the regime’s mind, although that certainly played a factor as the military has hardly been immune to it. Who wants to serve in an armed forces that has thrown meritocracy in the trash to make sure the commissioned ranks include as many strong black lesbians as possible, that spends more time making sure the enlisted ranks understand the nuances of pronoun usage and the finer points of critical race theory than training for war? Demoralizing as all that has been, the absolutely pointless debacle of the Neocon Forever War in the Middle East has played at least as large a role.
The Terror War started with the moral fervor of a crusade. The Arabs1 had struck at America’s heart, destroying the World Trade Centre2 and attacking the Pentagon itself. Osama bin Laden had to be found and killed; Al Qaeda had to be dismantled; we had to fight them over there or we’d have to fight them over here3. Then we were told that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program, that he was working on weapons of mass destruction, and that we had to destroy his fascist Ba’athist regime before Zero Day destroyed DC or NYC or some other sodomopolis that people still actually liked back in those days.
And then, for twenty years – for so long that by the end, there were young men serving in the same war that their fathers had fought in at the beginning – America stumbled around like a drunken bull elephant, smashing up countries it knew nothing about for reasons that no one in charge could articulate. We were nation-building, or democracy-building, or institution-building, or defending the rights of women and sexual minorities, or whatever. The excuses seemed to change every few years, as the meat grinder churned on, sending back the occasional mutilated corpse, and a much larger number of the permanently maimed and the irreparably psychologically broken.
The retreat from Kabul revealed the sordid rot behind the tawdry facade of America’s longest war for the world to see. The military had spent a generation propping up a secular “liberal democracy”, which the intelligence agencies were quite positive was strong enough to survive the withdrawal of America’s military. Instead the entire thing collapsed before the military had even pulled out. Worse, the gross, criminal incompetence of the general staff themselves turned the withdrawal into a shambolic debacle. Worst of all, in the aftermath no one was held accountable: not for screwing up the war, not even for screwing up the withdrawal. The only officer to face any consequences was a lone, brave colonel whose career was destroyed for publicly suggesting that someone take accountability.
Every single veteran who had fought for the American military between 2001 and 2021 watched as twenty years of brutal combat, thousands of flag-draped coffins, and trillions of dollars successfully replaced the Taliban with the Taliban.
And they watched as every single member of the august class of perfumed princes and political bosses responsible shrugged off the entire needless disaster without offering so much as a “sorry.” I suspect it was hard for them not to also reflect that those same people had lied through their perfect Hollywood teeth about Saddam’s WMDs ... and more than a few might have wondered about Building 7 and Dancing Israelis.
Meanwhile, the border leaks like an overflowing dam.
Illegal immigration isn’t just an American problem. Migrants flood by the million into Europe, as well. Then there’s legal immigration. The years of the Terror War corresponded to an unprecedented demographic assault upon the core populations of every single Western country, most especially the Anglo countries that were the main belligerents in the war. The Neocon strategy was to invade the world and invite the world – importing as fast as possible the very people most directly affected and therefore most angered by their callous brutality. “Let’s stir up the barbarians and then let as many as possible inside the gates” is so obviously dumb that it’s hard to believe anyone could be that stupid on purpose, suggesting that these think tank ghouls specifically wanted to destabilize the homeland. I don’t find that hard to believe, personally: it’s not like they have any loyalty to the lands they manage. Their centre of tribal gravity is elsewhere. The homeland being destablized isn’t their homeland.
America and its satellites are controlled by a regime that has demonstrated itself to be incompetent and mendacious in the prosecution of war, contemptuous of the populations it rules and most especially contemptuous of those sub-populations who fight for it, and not so much unconcerned as actively hostile to the territorial integrity of the states they control.
It is no accident that the American military is in a recruiting crisis. Who in their right mind would want to fight for a regime regarding which the primary controversy is whether it is merely stupid or actively evil, and of which it is not controversial at all that the stupid and/or evil people managing it hate you?
So. A few days ago a new recruiting ad dropped. Emma and her two moms were nowhere to be seen.
There was not a single diverse or empowered face. The stunning and brave had disappeared entirely. Instead, we were treated to an old-school Be All You Can Be slogan, underlining footage of a planeload of a ruggedly masculine white faces parachuting out into the open air.
The response on Xitter, at least, was one of unrelenting mockery. Oh, now that we’re on the verge of war with Russia and China, suddenly you want the despised white boys to place their stale, pale, and male bodies in the way of switchblade drones and SAMs? Sorry, no. Fight your own war. Best of luck with the trans women of colour, we’re sure their pronoun power will prove more than sufficient to defeat the Mongol hordes.
This is probably not the response that the army’s marketing department was hoping for. The ad likely emerged from a long series of interminable and extremely awkward committee meetings, in which everyone danced around the obvious fact that years of messaging aimed at the college-indoctrinated neurodivergent socially conscious zillennial demographic had manifestly failed to attract the hoped for diverse army of the future, but had quite successfully alienated the long-standing core recruiting pool.
So, back to basics.
Show the rubes some red meat, and they’ll forget all about Emma.
Right?
Anheuser-Busch tried the same thing after its partnership with Dylan Mulvaney drove the sales of Bud Light through the floor. They didn’t dare apologize for an ill-considered affiliate campaign with a demented TikTok groomer. Instead, they tried to pretend that never happened, and pushed out a series of ads featuring Harley-Davidsons, tough working class men, American flags, and all the rest of the accoutrements of six-pack patriotism with which they had habitually adorned their product up until five minutes ago. It failed spectacularly. Sales didn’t budge, and AB InBev’s stock price did not recover. By associating their brand with a flamboyant tranny, they had made it a synechdoche for homosexuality. That association is now by all appearances effectively permanent.
Just so, perhaps, the US military.
Since the Obama years the officer corps, and particularly the general staff, has become bloated with political toadies. Old women like Mark “I want to understand white rage” Milley, whose best-known hit was promising to pass military secrets to the Chinese in case Cheetoh Hitler did something rash like trying to provoke WWIII in the South China Sea (something that sober and honest adults in the room such as Biden would never do) ...
Mincing bloatlords like Lloyd Austin, last seen hiding his face behind a pandemic panic shield, most famous for standing down the entire US military so the ‘extremism’ of voting Republican could be rooted out ...
Lovecraftian horrors like “Admiral” “Rachel” Levine ...
And most recently America’s first (biologically) female admiral to be appointed to lead the Navy, the schoolmarmish Lisa Franchetti.
Patton, MacArthur, Grant, and Lee these organisms are not.
The one fighting general with some resemblance to the warlords of old was James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who enjoyed a brief burst of popularity around 2017 or so until he was revealed as just another swamp creature slobbering after board appointments to consultancies and defense contractors, in the interests of which he was more than happy to betray both the soldiers he was appointed to lead and the president who appointed him to lead them.
Combine this with years of gay recruiting ads, leaked gender theology training videos, endless stories of training standards being reduced in order to ensure female fighter pilots and rangers can make the cheapened grade, bases being renamed to expunge the memory of Confederate war heroes, and hundreds of other little embarrassments and petty humiliations, and it perhaps should not be surprising that even in the midst of a terrible economy the white men the regime desperately needs to fight its wars are refusing to do so.
Sensibly enough, they are behaving like Achilles at the opening of the Iliad.
Metaphorically, the American warrior’s woman has been taken from him. Briseis in this analogy could be America itself, which has been rendered something uncomfortably alien as it has been handed over to aliens. It could stand for the real estate market, which Americans are increasingly priced out of so that BlackRock and the real estate trusts can turn a nation of homeowners into a rental favela. Frankly, it could be less a metaphor than a simple statement of fact: the American woman, once the envy of the world, has been mutated by decades of birth control pills, SSRIs, social media derangement, and feminism into a disquieting ungulate whose exterior ugliness is exceeded only by the spiteful resentment of her bitter soul.
Disrespected and dispossessed, the American Achilles refuses to fight.
Of course, the plot of the Iliad would have gone nowhere if Achilles had stayed reclining on his pillows throughout. Eventually, he was induced to return to the war: his best friend Patroclus was killed in the fighting, motivating Achilles to seek revenge. When he comes back to the fight, Agamemnon makes a big show of returning Briseis, although he dodges responsibility for the theft by blaming Zeus for driving him mad.
