Given my experience with young people’s hopelessness, I was skeptical of a Harvard Kennedy School spring 2021 poll of 18-to-29 year olds that declared “hope for America among young people is rising dramatically.”

Harvard’s #1 top finding is: “In the fall of 2017, only 31% of young Americans said they were hopeful about the future of America; 67% were fearful. Nearly four years later, we find that 56% have hope.” However, scrolling down, Harvard’s #5 finding reads: “More than half of young Americans are going through an extended period of feeling ‘down, depressed or hopeless’ in recent weeks; 28% have had thoughts that they would be better off dead, or of hurting themself in some way.”x

So according to Harvard, with the defeat of Trump and the election of Biden, the majority of young Americans are hopeful about America’s future but, at the same time, the majority of them are experiencing extended despair about their own lives. Furthermore, if among the young Americans who bothered to respond to the poll, “28% have had thoughts that they would be better off dead, or of hurting themself in some way,” then the actual percentage of young people with this level of deep despair—including those reluctant to report suicidality to a pollster—is likely higher.

For the last two decades, critically-thinking young people have increasingly been telling me that the idea of having a satisfying life is more of a fantasy than an expectation. On a political level, Trump repulsed them but so too had Hillary, and the Bernie-Biden shit-show made them feel stupid about having cared about electoral politics. On a personal level, many use some kind of daily combination of pot, alcohol, and/or Prozac to forget their student-loan debt or to take the edge off of their parents nagging them to get a job with benefits; while others use Adderall or some other speed to hold on to a miserable job such as moving boxes around a giant Amazon warehouse.

The level of hopelessness among the young critical thinkers in my clinical practice is actually much lower than the level of despair among those I chat with outside of my day job (such as baristas, servers, retail clerks, and college students). The young people I see in my practice routinely have some financial resources—parents who are partially or totally supporting them, or they are among that small handful of young people with decent-paying jobs and health insurance without outrageous deductibles and ridiculous co-payments.

Even among those young critical thinkers with jobs that allow them to actually afford their own apartment, life is mostly a shit deal. They tell me there are no in-person cool scenes to connect with other critical thinkers. There are no counterculture coffee houses or socialist/anarchist independent book stores, but instead meet ups and megachurches—depressing prospects especially for the more radical among these young people.

Of course, there is social media, which is hated by every one of the critical-thinking young people I talk to. On the political-intellectual level, they hate how their loneliness and boredom is exploited to collect marketing data. On the personal-emotional level, they hate its insult to injury of forcing them to see other young people with great lives—painful to see even when they have direct knowledge that a Facebook braggart is a Facebook bullshitter.

Among young critical thinkers, in my practice, I spend more time with young men than any other group. Lacking any cool in-person scenes to meet women, they spend many hours swiping profiles on Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, but they tell me that unless a guy has a model-pretty face and meets the height requirements, few women reciprocally “swipe right” on them. Of course, free Internet porn is plentiful and they can masturbate to it—unless they are on Prozac or some other so-called antidepressant which routinely diminishes the capacity to achieve an erection. If not for the distraction of video games, even more of their time would be spent considering whether they would be better off dead.

Some of these critical thinkers do have faces pretty enough to have been successful with their dating aps, and so they have had sex with people other than themselves. However, whether these attractive young critical thinkers are heterosexual males or heterosexual females or LGBTQ, even successful swiping has been no antidote to a general sense of hopelessness.

The CDC reported in 2020, that from 2007 to 2018, the suicide rate among persons aged 10–24 had increased 57.4%. Upon hearing about the suicide or overdose death of a peer, these young people are saddened but not shocked. While an early exit from life “makes no sense” for societal authorities, it makes perfect sense to them.

If you are a liberal Boomer desperate to see hopeful signs, somehow you will find them. If you are desperate to see hopeful signs in Joe Biden, you will somehow find them, and if you are a real Pangloss, you will somehow find hopeful signs even with respect to climate change. So if you are a liberal Boomer desperate to remain in denial about failing future generations, you will revel in Harvard finding #2: “Young Americans are significantly more likely to be politically engaged than they were a decade ago; a sharp increase in progressive political values marked since 2016,” as young people who reported themselves as “politically active” increased in the last decade from 24% to 36%.

However, anybody can call themselves “politically engaged” or “politically active.” When I talk to young people who are actually politically engaged enough to show up at a BLM demonstration, I ask them if they believe that 36% of their peers are “politically active,” and they laugh, telling me 3.6% would be too high of an estimate. They tell me that many of their peers equate political activism with voting. I ask these real-deal activists and organizers if they are hopeful, and they tell me that they are not—not simply because the real number of them who truly are politically active is low but because among even those who are, few are completely committed.

In some areas, these young critical thinkers are even more hopeless than I am—for example, about the prospect of them receiving social security when they are old. I sound Pollyannaish to some of them when I tell them, “Yeah, the politicians will screw you by taking more out of your paycheck, but they have to keep social security going or else Florida and Arizona will cease to exist.” Hopefully, I am not selling them some false hope here.

Why are Young People so Hopeless?

Some Boomers might ask, “Don’t they have reasons for hope? Hasn’t there at least been some progress for some groups with regards to some civil rights? My sense is that critically-thinking young people’s hopelessness is only partially caused by social, economic, and environmental injustices. Their hopelessness appears caused more by the reality that to be terrified and broken has become the norm.

These young critical thinkers are well aware of the fact that American society has always been controlled by rich scumbags who have always exploited whoever and whatever they could to become even richer scumbags. What seems almost unfathomable for these young people is that not that many years ago, American workers actually put it all on the line to defeat these scumbags. When, for example, they see the solidarity, smarts, and cojones of the workers who occupied a factory in the Flint Sit-Down Strike during the Great Depression, it feels as if they are looking at a different species than their own.

In the case of Edward Snowden, one of the very few individual models of courage they see today, these young critical thinkers view his so-far survival as a miracle that won’t last. And after the U.S. government’s sadistic punishment of Julian Assange, these young critical thinkers conclude that the U.S. government can now make courageous people pay even a worse price than assassination and prison. These young people are all familiar with Orwell’s 1984, and like Orwell, they eschew romanticism and know that clever totalitarianism can destroy courage and kill hope.

In contrast to Snowden and Assange, virtually all the public figures they see are completely gutless—possessing an extraordinary cowardice that a spineless mainstream media terms as maturity. They see this “maturity” with both the Repugs and the Dems, from Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell’s cowardice with respect to Trump, to Bernie’s cowardice with respect to the DNC.

Perhaps even more demoralizing for these young people than the gutlessness that they see from politicians is the cowardice they see from authorities in their daily lives. Two decades ago, I talked to young people who would become excited about a new teacher who was authentic and told taboo truths; while those brave teachers would often get fired or not have their contracts renewed, at least these young people had witnessed models of courage. Nowadays, no young people are telling me about their courageous teachers. They tell me only about teachers so terrified of being “cancelled” that they are so boring that these young people can’t pay attention to them no matter how many milligrams of Adderall they pop.

Back in the 80s when I began my career as a clinical psychologist, there were psychologists and psychiatrists willing to risk their careers to challenge drug company hegemony and authoritarian psychiatry institutions, and a few of them were even in positions of power. Psychiatrist Loren Mosher, chief of the Center for Schizophrenia Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), created an alternative approach called the Soteria House to standard authoritarian hospitalization for people diagnosed with schizophrenia (helping start and run it was social worker Voyce Hendrix, cousin of Jimi). The Soteria staff was comprised of non-professionals who were selected and trained to relate to “madness” and altered states without preconceptions and labels; and heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs were rarely used. Soteria produced great results, but as Big Pharma had begun to take over psychiatry, Mosher was fired from his NIMH position. Today, there are few psychologists and psychiatrists willing to speak out against Big Pharma hegemony and authoritarian psychiatry, and their tiny organizations — such as the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry — are invisible to the mainstream media and have little power to change a mental health profession that is throwing an ever-increasing number of young critical thinkers under the Big Pharma bus.

There has always been governmental-corporatist punishments for courageous challenges, but today, society itself has changed. Those punished for courageous challenges can no longer expect support from a large segment of society, and this has had a chilling effect. Compare society’s treatment of Eugene Debs—the hero of Bernie’s youth and the subject of a Sanders produced a documentary—to society’s treatment of Ralph Nader, the bogey man of a more “mature” Bernie.

“Eugene Debs, a lifelong Democrat who three times campaigned for Grover Cleveland,” notes his biographer Ray Ginger, “was deprived of faith in the major political parties” initially by the corporatist actions of Grover Cleveland during the 1894 Pullman Strike. Beginning in 1900, Debs ran as the Socialist candidate for president, and would ultimately run five times. In the 1912 presidential election, Debs obtained 6% of the vote and pissed off Democrat Woodrow Wilson who won the election but with only with 42% of the vote (in a race that included Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft). Wilson would get his revenge by incarcerating an elderly Debs in a hard-time federal penitentiary after Debs spoke out against Wilson’s entry into World War I (Wilson had been re-elected president in 1916 on a pledge of neutrality but reversed himself and venomously attacked those who did not follow suit). Wilson’s venom for Debs was such that even after the end of the war, Wilson announced, “This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.”

However, despite his treatment by Wilson, Debs remained so popular among many Americans that it was politically astute for Warren Harding, the Republican president following Wilson, to commute Debs’s sentence, and in 1921, Eugene Debs was released from the Atlanta federal penitentiary. Estimates of the crowd that welcomed his return to his hometown Terre Haute, Indiana ranged from 25,000 to 50,000, and Gene was hoisted above the crowd and carried. That was a different American society than the one that Snowden and Assange face today, and a different one than Ralph Nader faced following his defiance of the Democratic Party in 2000.

Ralph Nader may well be the most accomplished “pro-human/anti-corporatist” figure in U.S. history, as he along with “Nader’s Raiders” (the young consumer advocates who Nader came to inspire and lead) were responsible for the following safety and human rights protections: the Occupation and Safety Health Act; the Environmental Protection Agency; Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act; Safe Water Drinking Act; Clean Water Act; Nuclear Power Safety; Wholesome Meat Act; Clean Air Act; Mine Health and Safety Act; Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; Freedom of Information Act; and the Whistleblower Protection Act.

Earlier in Nader’s activist career, in the 1960s, when fighting for automobile safety against automakers, a key ally was Democratic Senator Abe Ribicoff, but by the 1980s, the Dems began to aggressively pursue corporate money; and by the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s agenda was a corporatist one (e.g., passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act). However, Nader still had not completely given up on the Democrats even by the late 90s. “From 1980 to 2000,” Nader recounted, “we tried every way to get the Democrats to pick up on issues that really commanded the felt concern in daily life of millions of Americans, but were issues that corporations didn’t want attention paid to.” Clinton and his then vice president Al Gore refused to meet with Nader, and so Ralph could not convince them to support even the most politically popular anti-corporatist agenda. Finally, Nader could no longer stomach the Democratic Party’s complete betrayal of the American people, and he ran as the Green Party candidate for president.

After Al Gore was narrowly defeated in Florida and lost the electoral-college vote to George W. Bush, Nader not only received the expected rebukes from mainstream Dems but received even greater scorn from so-called “progressives.”Eric Alterman, a columnist for the Nation, stated about Nader: “The man needs to go away. I think he needs to live in a different country. He’s done enough damage to this one. Let him damage somebody else’s now… To me, he’s a very deluded man. He’s a psychologically troubled man.” Todd Gitlin, former president of the Students for a Democratic Society, stated about Nader’s 2000 presidential run: “I find this worse than naive. I think it borders on the wicked.”

Unlike Gene Debs, Ralph did not to return to his hometown of Winsted, Connecticut to thousands of people who hoisted him above the crowd and carried him. Instead, the man who in the 1970s was up there with Walter Cronkite as one of the most trusted and admired men in America, has for quite some time been marginalized by both the Dems and the mainstream media.

Ralph continues to be so much of a pariah among the Blue leadership that, as Nader put it in 2016, Bernie Sanders is “obsessed by the way I was shunned. He hasn’t returned a call in 17 years.” In Orwell’s 1984, Winston is taken to Room 101 by authorities who have knowledge of everybody’s greatest fears, which for Winston was being mauled by rats; and when Winston sees the rat cage and the possibility that his head will be inserted in it, he betrays the love of his life, Julia, by stating that she should receive the torture instead of him. Bernie’s greatest fear is the derailment of his political career, and apparently even just talking to Ralph is enough of a crime for this punishment.

Anyone familiar with Gene Debs (as Bernie certainly is, having himself voiced Gene’s words in his documentary about him) knows that Debs had warned that the Democratic Party will never be a true friend of the working class. But after Bernie betrayed his hero by “swiping right” on the war-monger corporatist Hillary—who lost anyway and then blamed Bernie for being a rotten lover—some young people felt sorry for Bernie.

With social media, their Internet browsing records, the NSA, and a generally surveilled society, young critical thinkers assume that their greatest fears can easily be known, and that they too—just like Winston and Bernie—can at any time be broken and humiliated. Pervasive fear, as much as anything, is why many of them feel hopeless.

counterpunch.org

Americans’ trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four percentage points since last year to 36%, making this year’s reading the second lowest in Gallup’s trend.

In all, 7% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” and 29% “a fair amount” of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting — which, combined, is four points above the 32% record low in 2016, amid the divisive presidential election campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In addition, 29% of the public currently registers “not very much” trust and 34% have “none at all.”

These findings, from a Sept. 1-17 poll, are the latest in Gallup’s tracking of the public’s confidence in key U.S. institutions, which began in 1972. Between 1972 and 1976, 68% to 72% of Americans expressed trust in the mass media; yet, by 1997, when the question was next asked, trust had dropped to 53%. Trust in the media, which has averaged 45% since 1997, has not reached the majority level since 2003.

After hitting its lowest point in 2016, trust in the media rebounded, gaining 13 points in two years — mostly because of a surge among Democrats amid President Donald Trump’s antagonistic relationship with the press and increased scrutiny of his administration by the media. Since 2018, however, it has fallen a total of nine points, as trust has slid among all party groups.

Democrats’ Trust in Media Dwarfs Republicans’ and Independents’

Partisans’ trust in the media continues to be sharply polarized. Currently, 68% of Democrats, 11% of Republicans and 31% of independents say they trust the media a great deal or fair amount. The 57-point gap in Republicans’ and Democrats’ confidence is within the 54- to 63-point range for the two groups since 2017.

While both Democrats’ and independents’ trust has slid five points over the past year, Republicans’ has held steady.

Historically, Republicans’ confidence in the accuracy and fairness of the news media’s reporting has not risen above 52% over the past quarter century. At the same time, Democrats’ confidence has not fallen below the 2016 reading of 51%. For their part, independents’ trust in the media has not been at the majority level since 2003.

Just as Americans’ trust in the three branches of government is faltering, so too is their confidence in the fourth estate — the media. Confidence in the media among Republicans over the past five years is at unprecedented lows. After a brief recovery in trust among Democrats and independents early in the Trump administration, their trust has fallen off a little in recent years. Democratic trust remains well above where it was before Trump came into office and made attacks on the media a core message of his presidency.

gallup.com

Nearly all Americans agree that the rampant spread of misinformation is a problem.

Most also think social media companies, and the people that use them, bear a good deal of blame for the situation. But few are very concerned that they themselves might be responsible, according to a new poll from The Pearson Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Ninety-five percent of Americans identified misinformation as a problem when they’re trying to access important information. About half put a great deal of blame on the U.S. government, and about three-quarters point to social media users and tech companies. Yet only 2 in 10 Americans say they’re very concerned that they have personally spread misinformation.

More, about 6 in 10, are at least somewhat concerned that their friends or family members have been part of the problem.

For Carmen Speller, a 33-year-old graduate student in Lexington, Kentucky, the divisions are evident when she’s discussing the coronavirus pandemic with close family members. Speller trusts COVID-19 vaccines; her family does not. She believes the misinformation her family has seen on TV or read on questionable news sites has swayed them in their decision to stay unvaccinated against COVID-19.

In fact, some of her family members think she’s crazy for trusting the government for information about COVID-19.

“I do feel like they believe I’m misinformed. I’m the one that’s blindly following what the government is saying, that’s something I hear a lot,” Speller said. “It’s come to the point where it does create a lot of tension with my family and some of my friends as well.”

Speller isn’t the only one who may be having those disagreements with her family.

The survey found that 61% of Republicans say the U.S. government has a lot of responsibility for spreading misinformation, compared with just 38% of Democrats.

There’s more bipartisan agreement, however, about the role that social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, play in the spread of misinformation.

According to the poll, 79% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats said social media companies have a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for misinformation.

And that type of rare partisan agreement among Americans could spell trouble for tech giants like Facebook, the largest and most profitable of the social media platforms, which is under fire from Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike.

“The AP-NORC poll is bad news for Facebook,” said Konstantin Sonin, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago who is affiliated with the Pearson Institute. “It makes clear that assaulting Facebook is popular by a large margin — even when Congress is split 50-50, and each side has its own reasons.”

“It has profited off spreading misinformation and disinformation and sowing hate,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said during a meeting of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. Democrats and Republicans ended the hearing with acknowledgement that regulations must be introduced to change the way Facebook amplifies its content and targets users.

The poll also revealed that Americans are willing to blame just about everybody but themselves for spreading misinformation, with 53% of them saying they’re not concerned that they’ve spread misinformation.

“We see this a lot of times where people are very worried about misinformation but they think it’s something that happens to other people — other people get fooled by it, other people spread it,” said Lisa Fazio, a Vanderbilt University psychology professor who studies how false claims spread. “Most people don’t recognize their own role in it.”

Younger adults tend to be more concerned that they’ve shared falsehoods, with 25% of those ages 18 to 29 very or extremely worried that they have spread misinformation, compared to just 14% of adults ages 60 and older. Sixty-three percent of older adults are not concerned, compared with roughly half of other Americans.

Yet it’s older adults who should be more worried about spreading misinformation, given that research shows they’re more likely to share an article from a false news website, Fazio said.

Before she shares things with family or her friends on Facebook, Speller tries her best to make sure the information she’s passing on about important topics like COVID-19 has been peer-reviewed or comes from a credible medical institution. Still, Speller acknowledges there has to have been a time or two that she “liked” or hit “share” on a post that didn’t get all the facts quite right.

“I’m sure it has happened,” Speller said. “I tend to not share things on social media that I didn’t find on verified sites. I’m open to that if someone were to point out, ‘Hey this isn’t right,’ I would think, OK, let me check this.”

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,071 adults was conducted Sept. 9-13 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

apnews.com

The mandatory Covid vaccination policy in the U.S. army is an extension of Biden’s ideological purging program, but the logic behind it is not thoroughly understood by the public.

Conservatives see a likely decrease in morale and enlistment, while liberals see an opposite likely outcome. But enlistment in a volunteer army may not be the end-goal, and so we must interpret the moves in light of the growing potential of a blanket draft.

Superficially, the premise for the purge is the equating of vaccine hesitancy with so-called ‘Trumpism’, which in turn is ‘linked’ to right-wing extremism such as white nationalism – a logical fallacy. Because the logical fallacy is so clear, and the purge of norm-centric political views is the goal, it gives rise to all kinds of questions and theories.

Military officials would absolutely know that this is a false equivalence, as the recent Pew Research poll on vaccine hesitancy shows that roughly 40% of Americans do not want the jab. Certainly 40% of Americans are not white nationalists. Because this data is readily accessible, and really because claims to the contrary are heuristically absurd prima facie, it effectively fuels any number of questions about the patriotism and intentions of the brass:

“Why would top brass stand by while the false equivalence is used as a pretext for an ideological purge of America’s most patriotic and pro-constitution elements?”

But there’s a further problem in this conflation of anti-vax and far-right. This vaccine hesitant view also has a high correlation with African-American enlistees who may be aware of the history of the U.S. government experimenting on this demographic, which also reflects an overall distrust in governmental institutions within various African-American communities.

And this is compounded by a view in the populist right, that the problem with vaccine safety means there is a design to weaken the military. Then there is the government’s heavy-handed and politicized response to the Covid pandemic, including the publicized concentration camps for quarantining.

Moderna Covid-19 vaccine administered at Vilseck Army health clinic, Germany. Dec. 28, 2020 

Through understanding military sociology alongside the real challenges that the U.S. faces, both internally and geopolitically, we can trace future plans of the American elites.

While the brass have become convinced that a ‘Woke Army’ will be well-situated to suppress constitutionalist and anti-reset citizens in an insurgency, the same woke policies aim to improve resilience against Chinese propaganda in a conflict scenario. Eliminating anti-Covid vax soldiers is quietly equated to eliminating soldiers who will also refuse other orders likely to result in death or serious injury.

There are invisible costs to this proposition. Enlistment may take a hit, but there will be even more pushback if there is a full-scale military conflict which requires a draft. The hedge against this is to increase wokeness, as counter-intuitive as this seems for many.

What we are seeing is how the military is doing sociology in the present year, which may be quite wrong. The whole premise of the purge is only as useful as the sociology is accurate. Typically, good military sociology – results-driven – accurately gauges the public’s attitude in order to translate that into sound military policy and training. That’s how the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy was arrived at. It matched Main Street’s attitude in the 1990’s.

The U.S. military does not openly track the party affiliation or belief-systems of its enlisted members, and unscientific voluntary polls by publications like ‘Military Times’ tend more to reflect the views of its regular readers (conservative) than the actual population of enlisted on the whole. Of course, there are career enlisted, and those who just perform four years active duty and two years inactive IRR in their minimum MSO. Career enlisted probably tend to be more conservative than general enlisted numbers would indicate. But it would be an error to think that such tracking did not take place within the institution, but more, such analysis has been carried out by notable military sociologists.

But because of the ideological purge in academia over the last fifteen years, which hit the social sciences first and hardest, there has been a dangerous and growing principles-driven approach.

This principles-driven approach – ‘woke because we should be woke’ – is at odds with the realist and functionalist schools in state-sanctioned sociology which orient towards making policy on the pragmatic basis of results.

Marxian tools in sociology have proved invaluable over the past century, when they are utilized in harmony with Durkheim’s functionalist theory. C. Wright Mills, who wrote extensively on Marx, also informs the framework of military sociology. But the Marxist school by itself is rooted in conflict theory, where the principle of conflict (the class struggle) is central to society.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills on his BMW motorcycle – pictured in this undated photo

Naturally, the wokeness campaign is being couched in the language of pragmatism, – ‘woke because this is smarter’ – because this is still the attitude of the brass. In brief, the brass is being misled by academia, which in turn is unfit for purpose.

The weaponization of conflict theory towards the perceived pragmatic aims of the state, as the population is ruled through division, carries a high-risk of misapplication when the present body of literature is dominated by actual conflict theorists. This can lead to a bigger disaster if the aim is to prepare for a draft.

A key factor to understand, again, is the increasing push to normalize the draft. As Max Margulies of West Point writes on this military sociology question:

“One common belief is that maintaining draft registration bolsters the link between civilians and soldiers, which has weakened significantly since the U.S. military became an all-volunteer force. Through the last two decades of war, only 1 percent of Americans have served in the military.

Some experts suggest that such a weak civilian-military connection contributes to a number of problems, including a lack of familiarity with the military, a military that is not representative of society and an unfair distribution of the human costs of war.”

Rather than aiming to defang the military, a transformation of military ideology is underway that is believed to a.) better prepare it for future conflicts abroad, b.) attract more recruits from minority groups (or make a future draft more palatable), and c.) prepare the force for use against American citizens identifying as constitutionalist, conservative, etc.

Point ‘c.)’ is probably the most disconcerting. The old-left with its ties to both the Soviet Union and organized labor had been traditionally considered the likely source of domestic counter-insurgency crises. Hence, committed anti-communist conservatives were drawn into the volunteer military, especially true for pipe-hitters in the special forces. This was part of a relatively clear world-view: communism is the enemy at home and abroad.

A social shift occurred with the collapse of the USSR, in combination with the insertion of Frankfurt School theories and the successful co-option of left-radicalism by the Soros associated non-profit industrial complex. The outsourcing of industrial jobs to developing countries was also part of this change of left-radicalism, from labor-industrial unionism into the loftier and deeply abstracted halls of academia.

Now with social media, as part of the intelligence services, there is an ability to entirely control radical left-movements. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, for example, is effectively the ‘Minister of Information’ for Antifa and BLM. There was a pragmatic rationale behind American elites push for progressivism as the unofficial ideology of the state. This is because American conservatism, with its roots in classical liberalism, favors decentralization, while progressivist socialism generally favors the centralization of state authority.

In our analysis “Biden’s Pro-Terrorism Policy & Ideological Purging Is a Dangerous Combination That Strains Social and Military Support”, we emphasized that “America’s deep state and oligarchy have landed upon a type of civilizational about-face, where the legitimating social ideology is increasingly being made into the legitimating ideology of the military.”

This much is to be expected, however, since the median views among the ranks of the enlisted including NCOs ought to generally reflect those of society. It is a greatly related matter, though, that the NGO industrial complex in the U.S. has promoted this ideological shift among the civilian population.

In other words, American culture has been artificially shifted in the most radical way, not seen since the introduction of mandatory public schooling a century ago.

But the changes being implemented in the military come at a high cost, because they strain support from historically pro-military and conservative segments of the population. This may lend towards the creation of a counter-insurgency crisis as much as they are believed to be in place as a counter-measure.

In strategic planning for future conflicts in light of 4^th Generation Warfare (4GW) where a Baudrillardian simulacrum is constructed, there is an ostensible benefit side to this high cost in the equation.

This relates both to morale, unit cohesion, but also the motivations of individual soldiers in America’s future conflicts – likely in Latin America and also against China across numerous possible theaters. A conflict with Russia is also a potential conflict included in the thinking behind the ideological shift in the military

The thinking here is in part that soldiers indoctrinated into a culturally left outlook (or at least a left ‘dictionary’) will be better prepared in occupation and subsequent counter-insurgency operations at home and abroad, but also better inoculated against foreign/enemy propaganda aimed at the enlisted which increases perceived racial inequities in American society.

If the conflict is with Russia, then the thinking here is that since Russia is painted as an ultra-conservative state in liberal western media, then a ‘woke’ U.S. military might find similar inspiration as American soldiers in WWII.

Another part of the thinking as Margulies would likely affirm, is that this type of ‘woke’ sensitivity training among NCOs in the field may influence a change in banter and even decision making on operation assignments, so that soldiers of color do not believe opportunities and risks are assigned on the basis of race.

Historically, America’s opponents have weaponised social contradictions in the U.S. along the lines of race, which is in part attributed to the morale crash in the Vietnam War.

So-called Vietnam syndrome was warned about by Northwestern University sociologist Charles Moskos, architect of the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy. Moskos, a veteran himself, dedicated his career to the study of the U.S. military as a social institution, and his analysis and the methods he developed continue to form the basis of military policy.

A 2018 Blue Star Families Military Lifestyle Survey results showed that military felt both disconnected from their communities and from the military itself:

“Forty-eight percent of respondents reported not feeling a sense of belonging to their civilian community, and 43 percent felt the same about their military community. This finding was critical because “a lower sense of belonging to a community has been linked with both depression and suicide.”

The blatant politicization of once-respected research institutions like MIT has increased a growing distrust in institutions. And this feeds right into vaccine hesitancy – not only among conservative soldiers, but also black American soldiers, overlap here aside. But it is also true for those on the other end of the spectrum who exhibit trait openness, and are accustomed to critically challenging mandates from authorities.

The tone-deaf approach of the brass under the Biden administration on vaccines has worked against the desired result. At the end of the day, the military can mandate the vaccine. But what happens when these become bi-annual, tri-annual? Quarterly? Monthly? What happens if we move from adverse reactions to long-term chronic impairment and illness?

The present rate of vaccination for Covid among the enlisted is reportedly about the same as in the general population – just under 60%. But the costs against morale and cohesion may be much higher.

In concluding our thoughts, it will be a surprise to many conservative citizens that there are ostensibly strategic reasons for the introduction of elements of Critical Race Theory and ‘revisionist’ American history into the training of commissioned officers and enlisted of the U.S. military.

It is especially important to understand the rationale behind this sea-change underway, as they are sociological in nature, but to do so requires letting go of certain assumptions and beliefs. This is because conservative thinking is also principles-driven, and can lose sight of results. Instead our thinking must be carried out in terms of realism and pragmatism.

The U.S. military today is insufficient for a full-scale conflict, let alone a total war with Russia or China. If both are allied, there is a close to zero chance of victory. The idea of reinstating the draft has been bandied about for some time, but it is a view that has grown in popularity.

The morale disaster in Vietnam, with its drafted army, was a strong indicator that the vulnerabilities and inequities in American society on the basis of race would prove to be an Achilles’ heel. Vietnamese propaganda was highly effective in creating an illusion that a disproportionate number (relative to population) of black draftees were killed in action. The propaganda also buttressed already persistent views that the war they were fighting was on the side of those who were oppressing them at home.

While Moskos believed that that the successes of the Civil Rights movement were in part predicated on the desegregation of the military under Truman in 1948, this was still based in a functionalist sociology: Americans were ready for desegregation before Truman’s policy.

Biden’s advisors have turned sociology on its head, changing it from ‘what works’ to ‘what ought to be’. Moskos would not approve.

From CRT ideological tests to vaccine-refusal purges, the toll on the military will be high. While this much is understood, the real value and efficacy of the benefits of these new policies may be similar to those of the vaccine itself.

Part of the thinking is that a ‘woke’ indoctrinated army will be more ready to put down a civilian insurrection, now identified with the far-right as opposed to the historical left. But rather than trying to ideologically train the army for domestic counter-insurgency, the aim should be to be to end the policies that give rise to them.

Rather than trying to fulfill some absurd mandate to ideologically prepare our soldiers for an unwinnable total war with two nuclear powers, managing multipolarity and spheres of influence should be the goal at the foundation of military doctrine.