The Real Problem with the US Army’s Woke Recruiting Commercials

Senator Ted Cruz recently shared a video making fun of a politically correct US Army broadcast, The Calling, by comparing it to a Russian Spetsnaz commercial. Though he quickly backtracked and emphasized that he hates Russia just as much as any other red-blooded American, he did draw attention to a serious problem. Yes, the latest Army recruiting campaign is very woke but that’s not the problem with it. The Calling is muddled and self-defeating. The Army has become so traumatized and directionless it can’t even explain why anyone should join.

Here’s the tweet and video in question.

Holy crap.

Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea…. https://t.co/8aVFMW98NM

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 20, 2021

Any honest person has to admit this is a hilarious edit. There’s rising tension in the action, music, and narration. An elite Russian soldier trains, para drops behind enemy lines, crawls through the snow, and when he’s about to inflict extreme violence on an unseen enemy, the camera cuts to a girl and her two moms at an idyllic fairground. The message of the video is obvious. Russian soldiers are strong, patriotic, and masculine, while American soldiers are liberal, politically correct, and weak. Or as Ted Cruz put it, emasculated, in every sense of the word.

The original poster of the video followed up with a meme to drive the point home even more.

Before moving forward, this is not a fair comparison. Even without any context, it’s obvious that Spetsnaz Guy and California Girl have different jobs, and hers isn’t any less important than his. Also, the US military has special forces units too. That said, it shouldn’t be possible for people to make fun of the Army with its own commercials. It especially shouldn’t be possible to make an Army commercial look stupid just by playing it with no comment.

The Calling is a new Army recruiting initiative. I looked up the official webpage and watched the videos. Yes, The Calling is very woke, but is good. The page features five different soldiers and corresponding videos highlighting their unique life stories. The soldier featured in the spoof video is Cpl. Emma Malonelord, a patriot missile systems operator. Watch the full-length version for yourself.

The animation has high production value and more importantly, there is good storytelling. Each episode has some sort of theme. They’re all human interest features that would make good entries in a magazine. But there are serious problems.

When I watched the videos I consciously tried to figure out the creators’ goal. In other words, what is the point? As the viewer, what should I feel at the end of these stories? When tens of millions of Americans of military age watch these stories, what is the cumulative outcome that the Army intended to happen? That’s exactly the problem. I had no idea. Truthfully, I don’t think it is even possible to deduce the purpose without help. Fortunately, an article from Military Dot Com helps answer that question.

The marketing effort launched this week uses these short, animated videos “to help as kind of complementary [effort] to what we are doing in Army National Hiring Days 2021,” a massive recruiting effort scheduled from May 10 to June 14 that’s designed to connect with about 60,000 young people from Generation Z, Brig. Gen. Patrick Michaelis, deputy commander of U.S. Army Recruiting Command, or USAREC, told reporters Wednesday during a telephonic roundtable.

Great, but connect in what way? And deliver what message?

“We are focused on the 150 career potential job opportunities for the Army, but we are really focused on 11 priority [military occupational specialties],” he said. “During the period of Army National Hiring Days, we have a $2,000 kicker bonus for those that meet the criteria against those 11 MOSs, so that we can carry ourselves through fiscal 2021 and set conditions for fiscal 2022.”

Now everything makes sense. Naturally, I assumed that the Army was trying to attract people to the job fields that Emma and the four other soldiers serve in. It would be ridiculous for the Army to spend millions of dollars to correct shortages, but get so busy trying to be woke they forget about the jobs they were actually trying to recruit for. The Army wouldn’t do that., right? Right? Right?

The 11 career fields that most urgently need to be filled:

• 11X Infantry
• 18X Special Forces
• 13J Fire Control Specialist
• 13M Multiple Launch Rocket System Crewmember
• 14P Air and Missile Defense Crewmember
• 35M Human Intelligence Collector
• 35P Signals Intelligence Voice Interceptor
• 37F Psychological Operations Specialist
• 74D Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Specialist
• 89D Explosive Ordnance Disposal Specialist
• 92R Parachute Rigger

The five soldiers selected to represent the campaign:

• 1st Lt. Janeen Phelps, 46A Public Affairs Officer
• Cpl. Emma Malonelord, 14H Air Defense Enhanced Early Warning System Operator
• 1st Lt. David Toguchi, 15A Aviation Officer (Helicopter Pilot)
• 1st Lt. Rickie Plaisir, 25A Signal Officer
• Spc. Jennifer Liriano, 68C Practicing Nurse Specialist

Out of the five soldiers, Emma is the only one who’s on the list of 11 prioritized career fields, and probably only by accident. Remember Spetsnaz Ivan? Ivan and Emma have different jobs, she is just as important as him. But that statement reveals another problem. Let’s look at the list again:

• 11X Infantry
• 18X Special Forces
• Explosive Ordnance Disposal Specialist

Special forces is right there, near the top of list by numerical order even. At least one of the five commercials could have been about a Green Beret just as cool and highly trained as Ivan. The Army chose not to. Why?

EOD technicians are very cool too. There’s even a movie about them, The Hurt Locker (I didn’t say it was a good movie).

Back to the list. What are some other cool jobs on it?

• 13J Fire Control Specialist
• 13M Multiple Launch Rocket System Crewmember

Those are also very cool jobs.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

How about the very first job listed, the infantry? Not only is infantry on the list, they probably need more infantry recruits than all the other fields combined. Emma is important, but you don’t need very many of her. For all intents and purposes, it’s unnecessary for recruiters to target Emma at all. An army only needs a few thousand Emmas, and would get them anyway from the recruits drawn in by cool guy infantry commercials.

Wait, Emma shoots Patriot missiles. Isn’t that pretty cool? Yes, it is. But the Army makes her job sound so stupid and boring it’s not even worth discussing for more than half a second. Remember that one, because I’m going to circle back to that one (Sorry I stole your line, Jen Psaki).

Clearly, these five soldiers were not chosen on the basis of their jobs. What were they selected for, then? Hmm. That’s not a big mystery. What does The Calling web page say?

See how five young Americans made the most important decision of their lives, for reasons as diverse as they are.

Diversity is our strength! But what kind of diversity? Let’s start with their ranks. Three lieutenants, a corporal, and a specialist. That’s three commissioned officers, two enlisted soldiers, and zero warrant officers. This rank distribution makes even less sense than their job fields. Commissioned officers could not possibly exceed a small minority of the hiring quotas that need to be filled. Three lieutenants and two E-4 grade enlisted soldiers is a bizarre choice, unless of course, it wasn’t a choice at all. I don’t think the Army bureaucracy even cared what ranks these five soldiers were.

So if the “diversity” wasn’t in terms of job fields or rank, what was it? Maybe it was economic and social background. Let’s look at the five soldiers again. These brief animated skits provided limited information, but the best I can tell, Janeen, Rickie, Emma, and David are all comfortably middle class.

Jenny was the only soldier exhibiting even implied financial hardship in her childhood. I’m actually unsure how much hardship she had to endure because the video treats her blue-collar background as boring, uninteresting, and totally irrelevant.

Anyway, the Army focused to the point of obsession on her immigration status and… there’s something else about Jenny that the Army loves, I’m sure of it. But what?

I am somewhat confident that the soldiers’ rank and job preferences were coincidental and the Army put no thought into that. I notice one glaring pattern with our five camouflaged role models. Not a single one of them is a white male.

Three quarters of Americans are white. Our military roughly reflects the demographic makeup of the population it was drawn from, and the vast majority of uniformed persons are male. How could the Army pick five spokespeople and not a single one is a white guy? The odds are astronomical, especially when considered in addtion to the anomoly of three out of five of those soldiers being women. It’s not just unlikely, it’s impossible. Unless of course the Army was trying to not pick a white guy.

Intended or not, a lot of potential recruits are going to look at these pictures and videos, and feel like the Army doesn’t want white people. So many will simply not join. Many of those people would have actually been great soldiers but were turned off by the woke publicity campaign. And let’s be honest with ourselves. It’s absolutely true. The Army doesn’t want white men. We all know that if senior Army leaders could recruit 100% women and transgender people of color, they absolutely would. In a heartbeat.

You think I’m kidding? There have already been multiple scandals of woke liberals in military and police forces getting caught discriminating against white male candidates. See my previous article below.

The Growing Threat of Critical Race Theory

We should be grateful that genies don’t exist in real life. If the wrong leader at USAREC found a magic lamp, he would wish for the entire Army to be turned into disabled Muslim POC transgender HIV-positive sex workers.

Now I know Joe Biden and other liberals think being poor and being a racial minority mean the same thing, but they don’t. And being an immigrant is definitely not the same as being poor. So let’s not claim that Rickie and Jenny’s status as immigrants automatically makes them less “privileged” than the next person. Am I using the right terminology, Dear Liberals?

That brings me to my next point. Conservatives like the Zodiac Killer Ted Cruz are ridiculous with their constant hand-wringing about the army recruiting icky girls. I bet that is at least part of the reason Ted Cruz thinks our military is “emasculated.” If so, I have some bad news for him.

Yes, the Russian war machine has devochki. Yay! Woke liberals must be pleased about that, right? No. Vladimir Putin’s all-female ‘miniskirt army’ march in sexist military parade Express reporter Laura Mowat wrote breathlessly. Damn it, Laura, those aren’t even miniskirts. They’re just regular skirts. It’s impossible to have a normal conversation about anything.

Ted’s office has not answered inquiries as to whether or not girls have cooties.

The Russian Defense Military is just as woke as our Department of Defense, in the sense that they allow women into most roles, but the key word here is “allowed.” It is possible to be inclusive without crippling the entire organization in the name of artificially inflating diversity.

Why in the world would the Army shoot itself in the kneecap in a stupid attempt to be more politically correct? I sure hope this isn’t due to insidious pressure from our commander in chief.

Why is Biden Destroying the Military?

Ted Cruz himself made it clear in multiple statements he was condemning stupid Army policy, not Emma or any of the other individual soldiers. I agree with him and this is the thing I find most annoying about The Calling. Not only is it an embarrassment to the nation, it reflects poorly on the people in it. Let’s take Emma for example. I have no doubt she’s an excellent soldier, and that praise applies to all five of them. Emma is a high achiever, but it’s hard to tell because she gets very little attention in her own story. The vast majority of that episode’s screentime goes to her two moms, which is nice, but they’re not in the Army. Emma is.

Think about Cinderella. What do we know about her mother except that she was a nice person? What do we know about her father except he remarried? Absolutely nothing and we don’t need to. The story is about Cinderella, not her parents. That’s the biggest problem of them all. Emma is a bit player in her own story. The cartoon is a little over two minutes long, and her moms get an inordinately large chunk of it, leaving very little left to cram Emma into.

Why does Emma’s moms’ identity as lesbians even matter? The more we think about this, the more insulting it gets. These videos are really infuriating on a subconscious level that’s difficult to quantify, but Emma’s is the most infuriating of them all and this is why. The Army has gone full woke and gives way too much praise to people’s racial and sexual characteristics. But poor Emma is not special at all. In the eyes of the Army, she’s worthless. Her only value is a “special identity,” and it’s not even hers. It’s someone else’s.

This truth is all too apparent. Whoever wrote the script is not interested in her. Did Emma face any particularly challenging obstacles in school or her military career? The commercial doesn’t tell us, which means it doesn’t matter. All that matters is her lesbian moms and the interesting things they did, not Emma.

In the full-length Spetsnaz commercial, Ivan has a girlfriend. Does Emma have a boyfriend? A girlfriend? Anybody? No, she’s literally on the sidelines at someone else’s wedding.

Now how about the choice to animate the story? First, let’s look at the explanation given by USAREC.

The Army chose anime because the medium makes it possible to intertwine many moments in a soldier’s life into one product, Army officials said.

Okay, that is one of the many benefits of using animation. But like the earlier claim about this commercial being about specific jobs, it’s nonsense. There was absolutely nothing in any of those five videos that couldn’t have been captured by a camera crew, or composited with existing footage and photos. Making the soldiers’ stories cartoons added nothing. But it’s worse than that.

These Twitters stated the problem pretty well, in my opinion.

Not only did animation not add anything to the story, it was reductive in nature. The problem with being “woke” is that wokeness takes complex human beings like Emma and reduces them down to their lowest common denominator. From a woke liberal’s perspective, Emma is a white woman with lesbian parents. That is all that matters about her to a liberal. Maybe that’s why liberal storytellers both on and off the web are so attracted to animation. They can take human beings, break them down into two-dimensional characters, and strip away everything else.

Speaking of Twitter, here’s some highlights from that dumpster fire.

Or, you know, the @USArmy kicks the @mod_Russia Russian Army’s collective behinds in less than one hour. Choose your fighter. pic.twitter.com/9G1QztzXOf

— Louise Mensch, M.A. (@LouiseMensch) May 21, 2021

Grass Roots Content or State-sponsored Propaganda?

Manspreading is an act of gender aggression and outright disrespect to women nearby… the disgusting act that is being fought with around the world and it is hushed up in the US. Men demonstrating their alpha-manhood in the subway with women and children around, deserve contempt.

A real feminist video. Absolutely not Russian propaganda

As far as I can tell, Pardes Seleh is a real person, a California Republican who moved to Texas for greener pastures. That said, I don’t know where her clip originated from or how she found it. I don’t think the video originated with Ms. Seleh, but was likely created by a conservative fed up with PC culture. I can’t discount that this is actual Russian propaganda. As outlandish as that might sound, it probably wouldn’t be the Kremlin’s first social media prank.

In 2018, St. Petersburg student Anna Dovgalyuk (Анны Довгалюк) published an anti-manspreading video showing a leggy friend pour bleach into the laps of male subway passengers. The bleach stains would serve as identification marks so “everyone can immediately understand what body part controls the behavior of these men.”

Anna’s video went viral, provoking an immediate and incendiary reaction across the Western world. Viewers were outraged at how evil feminists are. Like most viral videos, hundreds of publishers and social media users took Anna’s production and shortened it. Her introductory monologue was usually omitted, along with everything else that would tip off a layman that the depicted people are Russians in Russia. Without text or audible dialogue, a viewer could naturally believe Anna’s anti-manspreading crusade happened in a liberal culture like the USA or Western Europe.

Later on, a local St. Petersburg newspaper accused Anna of being a professional provocateur. She was a Putin supporter and her victims were paid actors. In light of such revelations, this stunt is widely suspected to be a government-funded PSYOP to make feminists look mean and nasty. If so, it was a well-executed lie that feminists assault people and destroy property, but real feminists do assault people and destroy property all the time. Feminists also get really, really, really upset when a man does [literally anything]. The story was believable with just the perfect mix of tongue-in-cheek. By the time anyone caught on that Anna’s video was a staged prank, it was too late.

Incidentally, Anna’s manspreading rampage was subtitled in English, while her other social media adventures, before and after, were not.

There is no evidence I’m aware of that the army recruiting video spoof is a Russian PSYOP, but that’s the point, isn’t it?

Ian Kummer

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