LLP #69: "Our Military is Weak AF"

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In this episode, Eric and Matt discuss the once powerful US military,  now the laughing stock of the world. Come join the guys as they discuss the military's rollout of critical race theory training, gender reassignment surgery being offered while in service as well as the general overall readiness and fighting effectiveness of the new diverse and inclusive military.  

Eric & Matt are both former US Army combat veterans who served together while deployed to Iraq during OIF III. Eric is most known for his YouTube channel IraqVeteran8888 which has over 2.4 million subscribers currently as well as his outspoken and no compromise stance regarding the 2nd amendment.  

Matt runs Ballistic Ink which is a branding and merchandising company serving 2A content creators and the firearms industry.  He is also very passionate about the 2nd amendment and freedom.

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Transcript

Eric: 0:00

Welcome back, everybody. This is Eric and Matt. And this is life, liberty and the pursuit, your beacon of freedom and the American way of life. Tune in every Friday for a new episode as we dive into the world of liberty, and what makes our country great. Alright guys, welcome back here on this wonderful Friday here to LLP. And we've got a great episode for you. We hope everybody's had a wonderful week, we are going to be diving into the concept of the woke military. This is one of those random things everybody keeps throwing around this woek idea, this woke concept that seems to be permeating every facet of our society and the military is no different. We're going to dive into the weeds on that a bit today.

Matt: 0:48

Absolutely. And I'm super excited because this is something that I know you and I've been talking about for a long time. And now we have a ton to talk about. And it's going to be excellent. But before we jump in today's episode, we're going to talk to talk about our show sponsor ExpressVPN. I know that if you're like me, or like Eric, you take your online search history very seriously, you want to make sure that is kept private and is not being sold to the highest bidder to force feed you ads. So I know most of you probably thinking why don't you just use incognito mode or some type of tool on your search engine. Those don't hide the data that goes to your ISP ExpressVPN does it's 100% encrypted end to end, so your data stays private. And you don't have to worry about prying eyes looking into what you're looking at. It's an app that reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers. So your ISP can see the sites you visit 100% of your data is encrypted with the most powerful encryption data available. Most of the time when I'm using it, I don't even notice it's on it, I opened my web browser, it automatically connects and you're good to go. They also have an app on the phone. So you click the ExpressVPN button on your phone, your browser opens up and you're protected. Anything you're looking for on your phone is protected. You're good to go. It's available on all your devices, including your Smart TV. So if you have a smart TV and you're worried about you know, searching stuff on your smart TV, it's protected as well. Guys, protect your online activity today with a VPN is rated number one by CNET, and wired get three months FREE when you sign up, visit our exclusive link expressvpn.com slash LLP. That's e x p r e s s vpn.com slash LLP ExpressVPN comm slash LLP.

Eric: 2:42

Right on one thing I would like to add before we move on to that is you also with the Express VPN, I notice there's no lag either.

Matt: 2:49

Absolutely not.

Eric: 2:51

You know, some of those VPNs you'll get a bit of a lag as it I guess, you know, goes in reroutes it or whatever, but very little if no lag on the Express VPN. No, I loved it.

Matt: 3:01

And that's really what sold it for me was I've used a couple in the past and they just it was really, really slow.

Eric: 3:05

Yeah, I do. I do dig the lack of lag. Yep. So speaking of lag, we're gonna get into this work military business here. So there's been a lot of stuff floating around. I'm sure you've seen all of the well, the way it started, for many of us is when we saw some of these commercials that military has been putting out Oh, God, and they're very cringe worthy. If you want to raise your blood pressure, go watch a few of them. They certainly don't instill a lot of confidence in the warrior ethos that, you know, we were kind of brought up under when it comes to the way that military looks at warfighting capabilities. And then when you compare our commercials to let's just say, some of the propaganda films, if you will, that like Russia, or China is putting out. I mean, they're showing videos of their soldiers getting drugged through the snow and getting hit with chains. And you know, they're coming in them out up a bit. Yeah. So it's, it really is an embarrassment,

Matt: 4:02

And that's when we were discussing podcast episodes, this one kind of it hit home with us, because, you know, we're prior military. And we have a very strong feeling about how that military should be portrayed. We fought for our country, we're infantry men, but we want to make sure that the country as a whole remains strong and look strong. And what we see what we have seen so far is this new agenda of inclusiveness and diversity, which, you know, there might be a place for that in the military, but at the same time, you shouldn't be bending over backwards to try to force a proverbial square peg through a round hole. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and you shouldn't put the the mission or the lives of those conducting the mission at risk for the sake of inclusiveness. And, you know, just Off the top of my head. Most recently, you've had, you know, two top ranking generals, and the Secretary defense testify in front of Congress about inclusiveness and all this stuff that's kind of being forced into the military. Instead of using a crawl walk run methodology, it's more or less like a sledgehammer and just trying to force it upon this. Let's just call it what it is a military industrial complex, you're trying to force change so quickly. And just off the top real quick. The first one was us Admiral bristles, he's the top Admiral. And they were he was justifying a recommended reading book from Kelly, which is CRT or critical race theory, anti American book. And these congressmen and I believe it was a few Congress, women, were grilling him about why this should be a recommended reading for the entire Navy. He's recommending this book, to be read by the entire Navy. And they're trying to justify why you would do that if an anti American book has anti American sentiments, and it's all about just a whole lot of stuff that doesn't really belong in the military. And his justification was that there's racism in the United States, maybe this is true, there's probably racism in all all military branches. But that doesn't mean that you force an entire anti American book to solve that problem that those problems should be solved. At the unit level.

Eric: 6:42

I think you're right there. And what a few things that I'd like to sort of add to that is that, you know, when you look at the military environment, okay, it's important to remember that military is literally a microcosm of society at large, right? A lot of people tend to think that, you know, military, you know, operates on some weird, crazy level that civilians would never understand in a million years. And yeah, and there's probably aspects of military lifestyle, that your average civilian might find a little odd, or maybe it would take them, you know, some getting accustomed to some of the aspects of military life. But at large, generally, military life is just a representation of what we see in the real world, right? So, you know, think about it. All right, in the real world, you've got all these logistical things that have to happen, right, things have to get shipped, you know, you have to buy gas, you have to have food, you have to have supplies, you have to have all the things you need to do whatever your job might be, right, there's an entire logistical situation that must occur for you to live your life in the level of comfort that you need to live it well. Just like, you know, in real life, you have an entire chain of logistics that must occur, the military is no different. And think about it, where there's a job in the civilian world, there's a job in the military. Okay, that's right. There's a job for everything, right? Someone's got to take trash, right? Like, yes, there's a trash man in the military, right? There's all these things, right. So it's important to remember that the military is not necessarily mutually exclusive, let's just say to being exempt from the biases that affect the rest of society at large on a regular basis. So the things that might be in play in the civilian world, of course, are going to be in play in the military world and in maybe a little bit different of a way that it might might even be a way that possibly people might not understand. What I mean by that is when you're in the military, it's like when you're put in these really terrible situations with each other. Let's say that, um, you know, you're with sometimes you're with people that you might not get along with in the civilian world, you know very well, right. It might be a group of people that you might not necessarily hang out when it when it's time to quit for the day, or it may not be somebody that you would necessarily be friends with. But here you are put in these really crazy circumstances together where you have to survive together and you have to watch each other's backs. But it becomes this completely different environment. When you're in danger. When you're overseas when you're deployed, you know, when you're in these really, really crazy situations, you your heart changes. That's what changes you is the situations that you're putting together and you'll never find a greater sense of pride as an American than to be 1000s of miles away from your home. And there's some dangerous situation happening. And all of a sudden, over the hilltop comes a truck full of people wearing the uniform that you have on and having the flag on their shoulder that you have. And guess what, they're your people and you don't think oh, there's a black person. There. This person, there's that person, you don't think about that all you think is, hey, these are my people. So if anything, the military unifies people in a way that the civilian world will never unify people. Because the civilian world does not challenge the individual, and the way that the military challenges the individual. And that is 100% truth, right, you learn to fight through those biases that you might have went into the situation having, yeah, it's completely normal to you know, when you join the military, you don't throw away everything about your life that you've had prior to that you were raised by somebody, you had principles, morals, values that followed you into the military, a way of thinking that followed you in the military, possibly a political affiliation, or some other form of bias that might exist, various education levels, right. So just like society, people at large within the civilian world, come into this military, and they think, okay, here I am, I'm doing this job. So we bring these biases along with us. But we quickly find out that these things begin to melt away. And once you remove the, the plastic and fake nature of our biases, right, and you get down to the real nitty gritty of life, and that means life and death, surviving, you know, taking care of people, once you see a greater cause, and you feel you're a part of a cause greater than yourself. If anything, the military teaches us that once we completely remove our ego and our bias from the situation, and we concentrate on the mission, that race is absolutely the last thing on anybody's mind. When you're over there trying to survive and do right by your people. You don't think about politics, you don't think about this party, that party, you don't think about the military contractors, you don't think about, oh, well, well, back home on the block, I thought this, all that crap goes out the window, the block ain't over there, okay, you're over there, you're on their block, you have to, you know, adapt to their environment and survive their environment, you're on their playing field, I'm talking about being deployed primarily. But the military in general can be the same type of thing. You know, it ain't the block, you're on Uncle Sam's block. And it changes a person I believe, for the better. I've never known of a single person that went through military service, even if it was just a six or eight year stent, they're not alive for whatever, that's cool. But I've never known anybody to come on the other side of the military, and not have at least a general respect and appreciation for all people, no matter who they are. And race, religion, sexual orientation, all of those things are completely irrelevant. If anything, those situations teach you how trivial thos things are.

Matt: 13:05

That's true. And when you talk about, you know, being on their block, you have to understand that at the height of, you know, both wars Iraq and Afghanistan, it was very common that you were going to be deployed two times on a four year enlistment. So you would you would spend two and a half because there's a pre deployment and a post deployment, you know, follow up. So you would spend more than two years on foreign ground. So you would typically do one rotation in Iraq, you might do a rotation Afghanistan, or you go back and do another rotation in Iraq, or two and a half. Regardless of what that rotation was, it was it was known that you were going to do two and a four year period. So you very quickly learn to let go of that ego, like go with those biases, like go with any type of, you know, prejudices, because the one thing that the military did very well. And they were very effective at it, at least when, when Eric and I went through was they broke you down to the level that everybody was the same. So when you went through your training and initial training, everybody, it didn't matter if you were a 200 pound yoke dude, or 145 pound, you know, marathon runner with not an ounce of muscle on you. At the end of that first week, everybody was laying on the ground, not able to do a single push up because everybody's sucking at the same time. And that's where you kind of build that camaraderie. Everybody is in the suck together. You're going out to the field. You're at the field on the FTS for two or three weeks at a time in the suck together. So you build that camaraderie.

Eric: 14:43

A cacophony of smells.

Matt: 14:45

Yeah. Boy, tell you about that man. So when you start looking at, you know, racial bias, and you have to understand this is at the line unit level. I don't know and I don't think Eric has a good understanding of how other MLM His handle those, but at the at the infantry level, that's how it worked on the infantry side, which I think is probably a little bit more has a little bit more camaraderie involved in that particular MLS or job just due to the nature of how everything is handled. But when you start looking at what we went through, and what's going on now, the episode was a mix of this episode is a mix of like wokeness in the military and weakness in the military. Because I was telling Eric, there's never been a time right now that I've looked at the US military as a whole and been a little bit more upset. I truly believe in my lifetime, we've never been in a position of weakness than we have right now. Now, people might say back in the 80s, you know, soldiers were on food stamps. And, you know, and which is true. I've talked to soldiers that were in the army in like the 70s in the 80s. And it was a bad time because there was no millet, there was nothing going on, you know, you had soldiers on food stamps, and they weren't really getting taken care of. And I think that even went into the 90s. But right now, just from a level of readiness, not food stamps, I don't think that's ever going to be an issue, but just overall readiness, military readiness, readiness and warrior culture. We're not in a place to be looked at as being the superpower that we are a matter of fact, we have other countries laughing at us mocking us. You know, it was almost like the the video that you discussed earlier, when America put out that all inclusive animated three part series about all these different you know, people in listening. It's like Russia look then ate our lunch man. Russia came along and was like, Oh, that's a that's a cute little cute. That's a cute commercial. This is what we do. And they got guys riding bears running around in the wintertime with no shirt on with two ak i mean, these guys are exuding everything that you would imagine, like a warrior culture to do. And what do we get? We get a girl a two moms that decided that she wanted to join the military, because it was her life calling. I'm like, that is not relevant to what we're doing right now.

Eric: 17:19

Well, I will say this, that, while I don't agree with the woke nature of, of our military and these cheesy commercials, and I think that, you know, the way that they they handle that could have been done a little cooler. Dang it. I mean, come on. I mean, think about the commercials from like, the 90s that the army has,

Matt: 17:39

All that you can be.

Eric: 17:41

Yeah.

Matt: 17:42

In the Army. Right.

Eric: 17:44

So the here's the thing. Life is not inclusive, war zones certainly are not inclusive. Right. So when we think about this inclusiveness, we think, Oh, well, it's some exceptive acceptance, right, that people associate inclusiveness with acceptance into a given circle. And that's not necessarily mutually the same thing. And it doesn't magically just put you in some club, right? Usually, the people that cry, inclusiveness are the people that are the least inclusive. When the you know, doors are closed, or when the cameras are off, or when, you know, they're just in the real world. They're probably the least inclusive people that they actually are. So it's actually sort of a reverse psychology type of thing. It's a it's a tactic, it is a psychology tactic, to get into the heads of other people and make it appear. See, look, we're doing something. See if if you have to go around grandstanding about how inclusive you are, you're actually not very inclusive at all. You know, what is the Game of Thrones? quote, no man who is king has to go around saying I'm the king? Well, it's the same type of thing, right? So if you're inclusive, and you do support everyone, you shouldn't have to go around telling someone that you do. If you do have to tell someone that you do, chances are you really don't. So I'm not going to get into the weeds on that. But I guess I'll just say that, that war is not inclusive, right? Like, if anything, life is extremely unfair, and the military sort of takes that idea that life is extremely unfair, and it throws multiple wrenches into that situation. So if you think normal life is not fair, the military well we get something for you. Okay.

Matt: 19:37

The Constitution doesn't exist in the middle.

Eric: 19:39

So much worse. Yeah. Well, sorry. In terms of, you know, you're going to be constantly stressed, unhappy, you're never going to sleep. You're going to carry around tons of gear. You're going to complain about it the whole time. Your back is gonna hurt, your knees are gonna hurt, your feet are gonna hurt and life can be pretty miserable. But in those moments, and those fleeting moments where we're put in the worst situations where we think, man, what did I get myself into? You look to your left and your right. And you go, you know what, these people here are going through the same crap I am, we all stink, all of our feet hurt, we all are going through a terrible situation, we all just got shot up. So in those moments, you find a little brevity in the situation, you kind of go, you know, what, all of these things that we thought were a big deal, like our petty differences, you know, we're really not so different. The enemy doesn't care, the enemy's not going to go, Well, let me select this person because I hate them more. No, think about the enemy, right? The enemy just wants to kill whoever's wearing the uniform. So while we are sitting here getting in the weeds over inclusive news, and oh, we have to be woke, and we have to tell all these little random stories, the enemy is preparing your destruction, he doesn't care, the enemy is focused on destroying the very fabric of what you are as a country, your countrymen, man, woman, everyone doesn't matter, right? So while we're worried about Oh, get my pronouns correct, and oh, well, this person had this gender change, or this or that, look, I don't care what somebody does, like, it's their choice, to decide how they want to live and what they want to do. And I may not necessarily agree with it, I think it's a little strange, but because I am very much, you know, bathed in the concept of freedom, as a person and I value personal liberty, probably more than most, you know, hey, that's cool. You do you but like, back when we were in, it was a don't ask don't tell type of policy, when it came to those types of areas. And look, we're not gonna get too far down the rabbit hole on that, because I don't want to get people to round up. But I'll just say that, you know, we knew we knew who was and who wasn't and, and look, it wasn't a big deal. And it wasn't a big deal. A big deal. No one gave a crap. It wasn't like, Oh, well, this particular soldier is gay. So we're gonna put him in some corner and treat him like crap, or we're gonna haze him, we're we're gonna be hard on him? No, not at all. Not at all. You know, in fact, in many situations, the person I'm talking about, I personally witnessed the soldier perform some pretty incredible stuff under some pretty depressive situations, the income our doing quite well. And like, you would never think in a million years, that thought never crossed your mind. All you saw was someone who was so well trained, that they just did their job. And they did it damn good. I may say, Yep. So it just wasn't a thing. Like people weren't. Even just 20 years ago, people weren't wired in the way where they're like, Oh, well, that person looks a certain way or that person, oh, he might be gay. Or that person, oh, he might be a Jew, or he might be a Christian, or that guy's a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim? No, it's just all you see, just like the enemy sees. You see that uniform, you see that name, the rank and that flag? And that's all you need to know. That's all that matters? Because that's all the enemy cares about American? Yeah, if the enemy is looking at a row of soldiers, okay, they're not going to choose which one to shoot based on? Oh, well, that one there looks like they might be transgender, or that one there has two mothers. And that was her calling to join the military. I know. They're gonna be like, I can grease an officer.

Matt: 23:49

It was really more, okay.

Eric: 23:51

The enemy doesn't care. The enemy wants your destruction. So you must prepare to destroy the destroyers. Like you have to be more vicious than them. That's the point of the military. We have to be better killers and the people that want to hurt us. That's true. And we're not raising killers. We're not raising proper killers. That's a hard conversation to have.

Matt: 24:14

I think that's a very well put statement. We are not training and raising the proper killers. We need killers man.

Eric: 24:23

Look, death is a very, very unfortunate byproduct of war. And here's the thing. It's not a chest beating, exercise and violence. Just because you train your your military to be the best killers on this planet. doesn't mean they're vicious, horrible, terrible people. You must be capable of violence. But it doesn't mean that you are at five by nature, a violent person. You can hate violence, you can hate death. You can hate all of these terrible things that make war ugly, make it what it is. But you must be careful. Have it because believe me, your enemy is your enemy. Most certainly wants your absolute and total destruction, and you have to be 10 times worse than them. And that's the way you have to wire it. Like, whatever threat comes my way, I'm going to meet it with 10 times worse than whatever they're bringing to me. And that's the only way you can survive it.

Matt: 25:22

So, to back up on the the conversation we were having, before we got into the stone cold killers, it was less about your sexual orientation, and more about your proficiency of your job. And I can tell you right now, that's all that we cared about. We didn't care about anything else. Color, race, creed, religion, sexual orientation, it was can you do your job? And can you do it effectively? And if you're on our team, can you do it better than anybody else in the platoon, or anybody else in the company? Because when can you do everybody else's? Yeah, that's what mattered. Now. Now we're getting into the point where we're including everybody, and they're like, oh, we're gonna do, we're gonna allow Trent, this is actually true, they're gonna start allowing transgender operations, whatever transitional operations from the military. So you can go into the military as one gender, I guess, halfway through your contract, you say, Well, you know, what I I'm, I'm gonna identify as a different gender, and they will transition you in the military. So I have a couple of problems with that. One, it's a very expensive operation, to they requires a very, very lengthy recovery time. And then there's always more complications on top of that. So imagine going into, I'm going to use just a regular job. So you, you get hired at a job, and they hire you. And they say, and then let's just say two years into your job, you say, Well, you know what, boss, I'm going to need a leave of absence for seven months to recover from a surgery. And by the way, there's probably going to be complications, the surgery, you paid for the company that you just hired me, you're going to pay for this surgery, as well as all of the expensive medications that go along with that type of surgery, any complications that arise for the next two years? Because my body's still trying to adjust, you're on the hook for that, too.

Eric: 27:18

During that process, do you have to maintain a regimen of medication? Yeah, keep your gender I'm not familiar.

Matt: 27:29

I'm not I'm not an expert, I did do a little bit of a dive into it. And yes, there's ongoing medications that you have to take to make sure that you're your body's healing. And there's certain things you have to do, definitely leaves of absence are going to be involved. So when you start taking all that into consideration, a four year enlistment, really, you're putting in about a year's worth of work, you're getting all this surgery. And then on top of that, let's just say you are an infantry or Combat Arms, Platoon, and you get deployed. And now you're in a unit, you're on the other side of the planet, and you're completely dependent on these anti rejection medicine pills, or any other type of medicine that's crucial to your survival. You're in the middle of the desert, and you run out of your medication. What are you going to what are you going to do? So? Is it in the middle? Is it the Army or the military, his job to express ship you a bottle of your medication for one person and one battalion of soldiers?

Eric: 28:28

I don't think that I think we're giving that situation way too much credit. I think. I'm not concerned about what big, big military cares about. I'm worried about the people on the ground. What about the people that rely on you to your left and right that need you immediately? Yeah, okay. That's what I've worried about. All right. There's incoming gunfire, and now someone's having some crazy psychotic episode because they forgot to take their pill that day or something. Look, I don't want to spend this in a thing in a way where I'm, I'm trying to make it sound like I don't want people to choose what they want to do with their bodies. Like, I'm very much a kind of person. Look, hey, I'm Liberty all the way right. Not libertarian will make that clear. I don't really get into the weeds on any one political party. Like there's things about the Democrats and Republicans that I despise. And there's things about libertarians that despise like, I just think more like I'm just a me, right. But my view is, I don't want to tell anyone to do their work do what, what to do with their bodies, what I'm trying to say, right, I don't want to tell someone how to live, but I don't want them tell me how to live However, a military environment is not a civilian environment. That's military environment is a different situation. And I feel like you know, the military we came from and and several of the other you know, g watt veterans that are out there that served you know, in the early 2000s and on if it's one thing that you can probably agree with me with and I don't care if you were Army Ranger that did five tours or SF guy that did three tours or A national guard guy that did one tour doesn't matter. This one thing holds true to all of us. Right? No matter what, you have the illusion of choice, right? So the idea that someone is, is gonna go in and go, Well, I changed my mind. I want to be this now. Hey, do you right? I'm not saying don't do that, or that you shouldn't. I don't have a super strong opinion either way. But that's a complete 180. From what we've always been told. It's like, you know, alright, you're going to eat this, or you're going to starve. Here's your food, eat it, or wear it or don't, we don't care. Here's your food. Here's your equipment. Here's your whatever widget, here's your shelter. Here's your whatever it might be that you come to get from Uncle Sam. If you don't like it, guess what? Deal with it? Because you don't have a choice. That's right. Is the body armor heavy? Oh, I'm sorry. The body armor is heavy. You can't carry it? Well, tough shit. You're gonna have to carry it right? You don't have a choice. The military is not about accommodating your personal choice. The military takes your expectations, or at least they should or perceived expectations, your perceived expectations and go Yeah, we're just getting rid of that. Yeah, you're gonna do what we say. Look, the military at its heart is compared to the societal totality of this concept. The military is socialist by nature. Okay,

Matt: 31:35

I'm glad you hit on that. All right. Gonna bring that up later. Yeah.

Eric: 31:38

So look, the military is socialist by nature. And what I mean is, you are in this environment where everything is catered to and dealt with for you. Alright, if you're sick, you have a doctor, like you have access to medical care. It's handled. You don't go and pay or whatever. Like, when you're in the military. You are, I hate to say this a piece of property you belong to the United States government, you are their property. Technically. All right. Now, of course, in practice, the general concept is that we all try to get along and generally doesn't become a big pissing match, directly related to just something as stern as a statement as well, your this your property, the United States real quick, Eric,

Matt: 32:22

I just want to interject on that. This and they truly believe you are government property because we were at Camp Blanding. And there was that guy that went out on the lake. And he got himself some third degree sunburn all over his back. And he got an article 15, for destruction of government property. Like they make this a legitimately game because I mean, he was out for about three or four days. And this is during train up. And he missed three or four days of training, because he was just so badly burned, he fell asleep on the inner tube out in the middle of the lake, and he literally destroyed his back and got an article 15 or

Eric: 33:02

So you never have to worry about where your food comes from, where your clothing comes from. If your equipment breaks, it's replaced or fixed. Ideally, we won't get into vehicles. Okay. We won't go with like some of the vehicles, if they're not well taken care of. If you don't have a, a mechanic pool that does a really good job. Yeah, some of the vehicles can be down for a while. Anyway, I interject here and just I'm gonna interject myself and just say, generally speaking, most of the needs that most civilians would would have to at least account for or struggle for a little bit to take care of the military provides. Okay, so it is, by nature, sort of a socialist type of existence. And some people come away from that environment, and they're not able to let it go. They leave the military and they think, well, all these years, especially if they're a lifer, you know, if someone's spent 2530 years in the military, or whatever, they come away, and they're like, Well, hey, you know, my clothing was always taken care of my food was always taken care of whatever. So it's easy for them to go, Well, I think society as a whole should operate like this. Like there's not, it can't happen like that, though. That's the thing. It's not possible, like the way the military as a cohesive unit, and as a society, and military is a little microcosm of society. But the way that very specialized society operates and works would never work in its totality for the, the whole, you know, total mass of America and all the people in it, it's just way too complicated for something like that, to be effective or desirable.

Matt: 34:51

And I'm glad.

Eric: 34:52

Ans I think that those ideas also that's why we have this woke stuff because these folks that are proposing it, you know, these all generals are people like that are you know, there's no telling all these folks are proposing all this crazy business? Yeah, they're their life military members, right? So for them, it's like all they've known is this crazy, quasi socialist. I don't know. Like, it's like they walk outside of society, they don't really part of our society anymore. They they've become so ingrained in in military life, that they've forgotten what it's like to be a real person anymore.

Matt: 35:31

And that's the issue is that the same problem that you have with long term or life term senators and Congress members, and house representatives. It's the same thing in the military. I mean, you have your top generals, typically, you know, they're much much older, seasoned, but they suffer from the same issues they've been, they've been in that military industrial complex, so long, and it is socialist by nature, that, you know, you just see all kinds of just crazy stuff, like recommended reading books. And it's not even when you hear the tone that they have with Congress, asking them why they recommend that they doubled down because that's what they're used to. Because I'm the admiral or I'm the General. And I said that should be done. So then all of my people are going to do it, and blows me away. And I just wanted to touch back on the the transition surgery in the military thing, cuz I don't want it to be taken out of context. I believe just like you did, that you should be able to do whatever you want with your body, I don't think it should be the taxpayers that pay for it. So what I was trying to get at was, is that if that's what you want to do, then just separate what the military when you join, when you join the military. It's understood that there's certain customs and courtesies, there's certain rules, certain regulations, and a certain lifestyle that accompanies that. It's a voluntary army. If you said, Hey, I want to change the confines of this agreement, then you can just separate from the military, take that discharge and do what you want as a free person, don't force the military to pay for this and take care of it when you can honestly get better service a better Military Medical Service and outside the military. So I'm with you. I think everybody should really do what they want to do, but don't put the taxpayers on the hook for it. They take enough of my taxes man, that's that's not something I want to do. But so that was the admin role. The Admiral came out as being like, Hey, I'm gonna you know, be anti woke or or woke there was also the top army general general Milley. So this is interesting story. So the top army general general Milley and the Secretary of Defense both testified in front of Congress. I think two days ago, the Secretary of Defense I forgot his name. He's a black, he's a black Secretary defense. And the general is a is a white general. So they're asking general Milley about critical race theory in the army specifically because he's over the army. And a lot of the seminars, a lot of the training that's going on in the army. And he's his quote was, I want to I want to understand white rage, quote, white rage. And he just has this fascination with it as a general. So what does he do? He has a personal fascination with wanting to understand racism. So from the top down, he implements this whole seminar training regiment around it. The Secretary of Defense, which is odd, as a black man, said, well, that's racist. So it's a very interesting paradigm that one is pushing for critical race theory in the army and one is not. So I'm very interested to see where they land on that one being the Secretary of Defense technically outranks the general, but we'll have to see. But all of this is really what's combining into this divisiveness in the military. It's, whether it is race, you're starting to see race, religion, you're starting to see inclusiveness. There's nothing wrong with any of this stuff out in the regular world, the civilian world, but the military, it's, I mean, it's just it's, while it is a strong industrial complex, it's also still very fragile, because you have so many people in leadership leadership positions that shouldn't be there. And I'll say that You know, as a person that served in the army, I know Eric seen it, there's leaders that are put in places that shouldn't be there that are contributing to the divisiveness. And it's just so it's it's so hard to watch from the outside. Because I used to be so proud of being in the military. I was like, Yes, we're the world's number one superpower, we have the strongest warriors. And I think he nailed it. Eric, when you said we're not raising slash training them to be killers anymore. We're at if you want to be the tip of the spear, you got to be a caged animal. That that isn't that crazy, I guess is the way to put it. You can tame your tame wild animal it should you should have the feeling of sitting next to a tiger on stage and having the handler there. And you're petting this tiger, knowing that this thing at any moment can kill you. Like that's the feeling that we should give every other country in the world.

Eric: 41:06

Yeah, I mean, I think that I think you're absolutely correct. I mean, I think there is certainly a disconnect with a lot of people, when it comes to the way Americans view, violence in our culture and the way that we view violence of action. And I think that the the overall type of reoccurring theme, if you will, that many people all around the world, let's just say people that aren't Americans generally view Americans as violent. They think that we have an unhealthy obsession with firearms. They think that we are very close minded and not multicultural minded in terms of understanding or even caring to understand the history of the world. Those are all very common reoccurring themes that foreigners have with Americans, they think that we are lazy, generally, they think that we're an educated, ignorant to the rest of the world. And they probably also have a general perception that we think we're better than everyone else. So I think with this woke military business, when we get into the minutiae of it, and we start looking at the finer details of what they're trying to get at, there's probably some people within the military that are trying to say, Hey, we're not trying to tell someone how to think on a given subject. We're not trying to interject, let's just say political bias into a situation, although they technically are, but there's probably some that are like, and if you've been privy to military training, or let's just say, military classes, where it's death by PowerPoint, and slides and presentations and stuff like that. There's always like that one presentation, where the person giving the presentations like, we got to do this. Mm hmm. All right. Yeah. Look, it's part of the freakin curriculum, we have to go over it. And you know what they'll do? Okay, they'll go, everybody knows that you shouldn't do X, Y, Z, right? And everybody goes, Yeah, yeah. And then they go, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, and they click through all those slides. And they're like, Alright, this presentation is done. And then they'll move on to something else. It's called Death by PowerPoint, you guys know, if anyone's been in the military, you know, is death by PowerPoint, hours, and hours and hours of PowerPoint presentation.

Matt: 43:27

Not even good ones either. And, and sometimes

Eric: 43:29

they're good, sometimes they're terrible, to the people's credit have to put them together. Look, PowerPoint presentations aren't easy to keep them interesting and engaging. The point I'm making is not the minutiae of how we teach things to people. We all know that people learn through various avenues and approaches to the science of how we learn and retain information. Everyone's a little different. PowerPoint presentations do generally account for many different ways of that, you know, the audio, audio tutorial, visual, that sort of thing. You know, that sort of response that we retain our information through? The point is, right, there are probably folks within our military that are responsible for this training, to administer this training, that are certainly going to glass over those slots. Okay. And then to there's probably people in the military that go, all right, well, we understand that this particular aspect of this training is just something that we want people to have more of a holistic worldview over, let's just say, we're not telling you how to think a certain way or telling you that you should believe this ideology. We just want you to be aware of it. Now there's I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and I'm going to say there's probably many that that's probably how they feel about the critical race theory training that they would receive in the military but the perception that more of the conservatives and the old school oh geez have with the issue is that it can certainly be too taken as a direct and blatant political pandering, and there's something else I want to mention that I'm glad we're getting sort of near this pot in the podcast, because this is a great way to end it. There's also another distinct danger in the critical race, theory training and all of this sort of stuff, is that it also identifies the people who politically don't align with that concept within the military. So then it could push the military leadership to say, well, Johnson over there, we think he's a racist ass wipe, and we're gonna get him out, somehow, we're gonna try to find a way to screw him, or we're gonna, we're gonna find some reason to mess with him. I think now, I could be wrong, my general thought process, I believe that the reason that they are wanting to implement this woke culture and this critical race theory and all of this mess into the military, is because they want to dumb down the military and get rid of the hard people. The people that aren't going to stand by and deal with the bullcrap, they want to try to find a way to get rid of them, and they want controlled opposition, and then military, they want polite lemmings that are going to do what they're told exactly how they're told. And with no personal concept added in there, right. You know, the military does teach you, you know, that you follow orders, right? I mean, it's it's just known that when you're soldier, it's like, yes, you're going to be asked to do things you probably might not want to do. But you don't have to follow an unlawful order, right? You're not required to carry out an unlawful order. So if some officer asks you to do something really terrible, and heinous and 15 other dudes look at each other and go, yeah, this is terrible and heinous, well, then guess what you don't do? That's right. Right, you're not required to do it. They want people whose moral flexibility and moral fiber, let's just say is a little bit more fluid. They want someone that they can go, alright, well, here's this idea, like, we're gonna go do this terrible thing together. And now I have trained you, I've conditioned you to accept my explanation as being some form of openness or inclusiveness as to why we're about to go do this. So they want people that are easier to control that are more open to the concept of doing things that might actually be pretty terrible.

Matt: 47:28

Yeah, definitely. They're on track on that one. And just so I know, again, towards the end, the second sec, devs name is Lloyd Austin, former general Lloyd Austin, is, in fact, has stated that critical race theory in the US Army is in fact, racist coming. There was also a medical doctor that recently went viral about that, or he has two medical degrees. Did you see that? It was a guy saying that, you know, he wasn't oppressed yet to medical degrees and all that stuff. Yeah.

Eric: 48:01

Dad, yeah. When into the board and lit them up over Critical Race Theory.

Matt: 48:06

Yes. you're starting to see a lot more that not. And that's coming from everybody. I've seen a lot of Asian people do the same thing. So I mean, it's just one of those things. I think people are just getting sick of it. I mean, it's like this whole woke thing. I mean, it's kind of interesting. Again, his fingers and everything, military society, and you're starting to see a lot of people just now are getting to the point where they're just tired of it.

Eric: 48:28

I think you're absolutely correct that what it takes. Alright, so how do we combat this? How do we deal with the situation, we reverse these events, right? And get us back to courage, right? We need courage. In our society, it takes courage to stand up to people. And we need to bring that back. We need patriotism. To come back. We need courage to come back. We need pride of our country to come back. We need people to see the flag and be filled with pride over the sacrifices that our military members and all kinds of people have made to sacrifice. So I think that the way we combat this is yes, if you are one of these people that let's just say these woke, people are trying to cater to or pander to rather, you need to speak up and be like, Look, I'm not oppressed. All right, I don't I don't see and acknowledge this racism that you claim exists, right? So it takes more of those people to stand up and say, What the heck, like, Can we just get back to working hard and, you know, paying our way through life and just enjoying our time with our families, and fighting for honor and fighting for freedom? Like and get back to that right. You know, it's just such an odd thing. You You would think that that's it's a novel concept that most people could just understand like, Hey, you do you I do me? We're all going to, we're all going to fight for this country. If someone tries to help us, we are going to bring down the full might of God and the military on their doorstep. And as long as we just understand that concept, whatever your God is to you doesn't even have to be the God we all, you know, respect and understand. Everyone can have their own mysticism that they have the surrounds them, whatever their level mysticism might be, I don't care what you worship, all we have to agree on, literally, the only thing that we have to agree on is that your freedom is important. Your life is important, the lives of your family is important. And the happiness and livelihoods of your family is also important. And as long as there are people that are willing to give their lives and fight for people, that's all, that's all it takes. That is all the military has to be capable of, is having little empathy with people and being willing to sacrifice to give the ultimate sacrifice. So I think we just need to get back to that just a very simplified patriotism. I think that, you know, the government at large and Gosh, I don't even want to get into the rabbit hole of all this crap that Biden has been talking about. He's been putting out all of this. I saw the press release, where they they went through and they want to define like, what they consider all of these domestic terrorists to be right. And you start reading through it and you're like, wait a minute, like, okay, I can understand, like, the super extreme ism or whatever that they're claiming, or whatever. Okay, in in its totality that statement. Sure. It could be read as, Wow, that sounds scary. But really, it's, it's, it's far more people than you would actually. I mean, it's people from many, many everyday walks of life, that are grounded in Liberty, right. So I think that patriotism, and freedom and liberty have been given this really nasty black eye. And it's been painted with a really destructive brush with ugly colors, and ugly, broad, horribly painted brushstrokes. I know that's a very weird analogy. But it's been given this ugly black eye. So that the people that love America that care about this country, they go, Wait a minute, you mean I'm a bad person for being a patriot? If you tell someone do you love your country, son? Are you a patriot? And they go, yeah, I'm a patriot. Of course, I love my country. They want just the simple concept of someone going, you're dang right? I love America. That person is somehow extreme or crazy, or needs to be written off or needs to be disarmed even. I'm not buying it. And neither is America, your average people aren't buying it, because it doesn't exist, these racial biases, these extreme biases, while they do probably constitute a tiny, little, you know, itty bitty little echo chamber for a very small and deliberately exacting group of people. It doesn't speak for the whole, the collective for greed.

Matt: 53:10

Yeah, I think that there's far more people out there that are more in line with the way that we think than the latter

Eric: 53:19

100%. And here's the thing, don't let the media, you know, create this idea in your head. That people that don't like you hate you. That's bullcrap. I can tell you that right now. Okay. The media is so good, bad. But good. I guess in their mind, they think they're good at it. I think, of course, it's it's a terrible thing. But they are quite effective at creating division. Division, is what sows the seeds of deceit and control. Right? If you allow that division to occur, they will divide and conquer there's a reason that is a military tactic to divide and conquer. You never divide your forces, right? If America is this huge force for good, why in the world would we divide our forces don't allow it to happen be bigger than what they're trying to make you believe this division is? And I think society will quickly self regulate and go right back into step where it needs to be.

Matt: 54:24

Well, I think you're starting to see that with the media bias with Project Veritas. I think they're doing a great job of doing like the whole whistle blower thing. And before, you would always ask, Well, if there's so much of this misinformation going on, why aren't more reporters or more media outlets blowing the whistle? Why aren't they coming forward? And the plain answer is, there's nothing in it for them. Why would they blow the whistle and lose their job they have, they have bills, they have a life that they have to, you know, live and you need a job or I'm sure they have a position where They live a life that requires income. So there's nothing in a forum. But I think Project Veritas did a great job of doing a GoFundMe campaign for whistleblowers. So now you have media outlets saying, you know what, if I come out and I just be honest, and I blow the whistle, I will have enough money in this GoFundMe to support me to find another job or move industries. So now there's something in it for them. They're saying, I'm safe. I can, I can no depend on this money, I can give you all of the dirt, which they have been, I think there's been three so far, major media outlets that are coming out, saying the shareholders are dictating the media, you're doing what the shareholders want. They're creating the narrative. And now you're actually starting to see it. So I think that they're doing a great job of doing that. Very, very few people have the intestinal fortitude to do what Snowden did, because he's one of one. There's nobody out there. This done like Snowden to just give up his entire life, and also Julian Assange and Julian Assange. So I mean, they're very, very far and few between, you know, I think what he did was commendable. And I think he brought to light. He really kicked the door open,

Eric: 56:16

He exposed the real gover ment.

Matt: 56:19

Yeah, he kicked that door wide open, and everybody else is just coming in and hammering them home.

Eric: 56:24

I'll just end this podcast. And for those of you tuning in here on YouTube, as well, thanks for watching If you've gotten this far in our podcasts, but well, just in this podcast, I believe it's important to make the distinction that if you are a person who you feel like you don't have anybody to talk to, or you feel like no one's listening, or let's just say you greatly respect and honor journalistic integrity, and you don't feel like you have a way to get your message out or you don't feel like anybody's listening. You can reach out to us, you can reach out James o Keith, you can reach out to regrow Hanley, there's lots of people that are willing to give you a platform, if you want to, you know, get that information out there. Let's just say you're maybe you're in the military, and you've seen some really heinous bullcrap get sent down the totem pole, in terms of training regimen. And you're like, Man, you know what, just doesn't feel right. Something in my heart doesn't feel right. This is wrong. This is morally wrong. What we're being told is wrong, and I don't agree with it. And something tells me something's is afoot here. let someone know, it's okay. Right? Look, if you're in the military, look, even if you're a one, if you're the bottom, private, and you're the bottom of the totem pole, every military member has the absolute right to petition the Inspector General of grievances. Okay, go to your ID, you can submit a complaint to the AG, it does not matter. You can be the lowest man on the totem pole. It doesn't matter. You see something jacked up, take it to the ag. Don't be afraid. Don't be scared. Don't bully talk to the Igy. If you think something is really

Matt: 58:02

I'm over here, smirking ecause I used to be there unning joke when we're in like, ey, Sarge, I'm going to go to G.

Eric: 58:10

Well, like the joke we would joke about as my word but look, just know that there are mechanisms in place for you to express your grievances if it's something that's serious enough to you. So if you're one of those people out there that are fighting for the truth, and you're fighting for what's just incorrect and right, and what you know, is right in your heart, don't give up. Look, you know, I was like what we do on the channel? You know, I know some of you're listening on the podcast, but like our channel, we don't always say what's popular, right? Sometimes we say things that make people angry, right? But that's okay, right? If we don't get angry, we don't get engaged. We're not really having those conversations and not forcing the conversations, but allowing an environment for those really important conversations sometimes occur closer to the fence line, right? It's not the cow way out in this right pasture or the way over in the left pasture. It's the cows that are near the middle eating the same grass growing under you. So sometimes those conversations, you got to get in the weeds a little bit with each other, and have those hard conversations because that's the only way we can move past this wealth bullcrap. And for people to really understand where each other's coming from,

Matt: 59:18

You know, and I know you mentioned military, E1s all the way up to E8s. I don't always se eye to eye with Dan Cr nshaw, but he does have a mi itary whistleblower co nection so that you can email he has a separate email for th t. And it's specifically set up for people in the military, to you know, whistle blow on, yo know, whether it's different se inars, and that's even how al of this woke stuff came out wa all of these military pe sonnel sending emails saying, He, this is kind of messed up. So you know, while I don't ag ee with all of his agendas, I do think that's a great idea be ause it gives them a safe ab lity to to vent their gr evances.

Eric: 1:00:01

I agree. I think Dan is can't come around, I don't want to go dow

Matt: 1:00:05

But he's come around quite a bit. I think his he's defin tely listening to his const tuents on uncertain thing.

Eric: 1:00:11

I think so, you know, this past Christmas, I sent Dan a message and told him, you know, Merry Christmas, and he messaged me back to me, Merry Christmas. So we've had our disagreements, but I do think Dan is a good man. And I think he does have, you know, the best interests of people in his heart. I do believe so. That's it for this week, guys. Tune in next week. So if you are here on YouTube, Matt, and I put our podcasts up every Saturday. Alright, so that's a Saturday slot. Some people tend to get confused about how we release our videos. But generally the podcast go up on Saturday, but if you can't wait till Saturday, you can go over to Spotify and Stitcher and Apple podcasts, all those places, we post them we got a whole bunch of different places everywhere Spotify Miss, you can actually obtain your podcast a day early. That's by going and listening and downloading it over on you know, the other podcast forums there. So if you're listening, thank you for listening. If you're watching, thanks for watching, or maybe you're doing both you're listening and watching. That's right. I know a lot of folks are driving going to work or they got a long drive or commute and they'd like to, you know, get our ugly mugs

Matt: 1:01:21

Well, I've got one I got one more thing as this it's a s ecial deal for those that are made it all the way to the end of the podcast. If you go to Bal istic Ink, we're gonna run a sal on all of our Oakley inv ntory. Anything Oakley 35% off only for our LLP listeners. You have to use code LLP. That' for you because you made it th s far.

Eric: 1:01:48

That's Lima, Lima. Papa

Matt: 1:01:51

That's right everybody lse that didn't make it. Too

Eric: 1:01:55

Oh, well. Guys, have a good week. We'll see you next week. See ya. Thanks for listening to life, liberty and pursuit. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else podcasts are found. Be sure to leave us a five star review. We'd really appreciate that. You can support us over on Ballistic Ink by picking yourself up some merch and remember guys, dangerous freedom. Have a good