Wokeness: A grave risk to America’s military

Wokeness is destroying American military might from within its own ranks, and it’s doing so more effectively than any foreign enemy ever could.

Episode 144: Wokeness: A Grave Risk to America’s Military-w/Lt.Gen.Boykin and Dr. Waller

Today we are witnessing a growing threat to our American military. A threat that is capable of doing what no foreign enemy ever could: Fracture the world’s greatest armed forces from within, through divisive political indoctrination and controls. That threat is called “wokeness.”

Entrepreneur Bill Walton had a long discussion about wokeness in the US military with the Center’s Senior Analyst for Strategy J. Michael Waller and LTG William G. Boykin USA (Ret), one of the original combat commanders of the Army’s elite Delta Force.

The conversation ran as Episode 144 of the Bill Walton Show as “Wokeness: A Grave Threat to America’s Military.”

“Our military should be about readiness, and its mission must be winning the nation’s wars,” said General Boykin. “There is nothing more important on the battlefield than cohesion – which wokeness undermines. You win wars because of cohesion, not because of technology.”

Waller, a civilian who has worked with the Army for decades, has noticed generations of careerist, rank-climbing officers “brown-nose,” in his words, their way to the top by going along with what used to be called political correctness, becoming politically correct themselves, and since have broken out as “woke.”

Wokeness, Waller says, is not so much an ideology as it is an attitude. Wokeness is the political and cultural extremism and intolerance of a small but militant minority that is forced on the normal majority. Wokeness requires mainstream leaders of an established institution to become servile to the extremists, to protect them, and ultimately to serve as their enforcers.

“Woke,” Waller says on the Bill Walton Show, “is a pretty loose term but it really stands for an extremist, intolerant point of view that’s constantly changing. You can’t appease it, you can’t please it, you can’t compromise with it. It’s absolutist and if you disagree with it at all or don’t go along, the woke people will destroy you. They’ll destroy you personally, they’ll destroy you professionally, they will ruin your family life. They will make sure that you can never advance in any places where they have influence.”

A video of the conversation appears on YouTube, with the audio available on Spotify.