The House has passed the National Defense Authorization Act last week, stripped of its worse Democrat culture war items. Today, Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska said he stands with the House Republicans who voted for the bill, without the bizarre Democrat amendments.
As someone in the military, Sullivan is concerned about the politicization of the military under Joe Biden. Sullivan made a Facebook video to vent about how the media has covered the NDAA and how media outlets have accused Republicans of a culture war, when in fact it is Democrats who are waging that war.
“I’m standing in front of the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the VFW post headquarters here in Washington, D.C., a testament to the men and women in our country, in the military, who’ve kept us free for centuries. Now, some of you may have been reading recently in the mainstream media about how Republicans—particularly now, this time in the House, on the National Defense Authorization Act, which we are working on right now here in the U.S. Senate and in the House—have somehow inserted cultural issues and social issues into this bill,” he said.
Sullivan quoted a PBS story: “House Republicans add culture war issues to the traditionally bipartisan defense bill.”
Then he quoted one from The New York Times: “Hard right Presses Culture Wars on Defense Bill, Imperiling Passage.”
After that, Sullivan read the headline from the The Washington Post: “House Republicans Wage Woke Culture Wars with the Military.”
Sullivan said nothing could be further from the truth than what people are reading in the mainstream liberal media.
“Here’s the truth. Republicans aren’t inserting anything. What we are doing is pushing back against a Pentagon that has inserted these kinds of social issues, cultural issues into the military,” he said.
Sullivan, who has been a Marine Corps infantry officer for almost 30 years said he has never seen a Pentagon led by civilians who focus more on issues, social issues that have absolutely nothing to do with war fighting or lethality.
“Let me give you the mission of the Marine Corps Infantry: It is to locate, find, and destroy the enemies of America through fire and maneuver,” he said.
“The Pentagon right now is doing things that have nothing to do with this kind of war fighting ethos.
He gave examples of how he and other Republicans are pushing back, through their oversight role in Congress:
- “The Secretary of the Navy is much more interested in climate change—he got his climate action plan out to the Congress about a year and a half ago—than he is in shipbuilding and war fighting and the requirement for him to have amphibious ships that can make sure Marines deploy around the world, none of which he is doing right now.”
- “The Undersecretary of Defense for policy, the number three guy in the Pentagon, ended his confirmation hearing by saying one of his top priorities was ‘to stamp out systemic racism within the ranks.’ This is a guy who’s never served in the ranks. This is a guy, when I pressed him—do you have any data on besmirching the whole military as systemically racist?—he didn’t have that. The truth is, the U.S. military, while not perfect, is certainly one of the most exemplary civil rights organizations in American history.
- The Biden administration’s Pentagon is paying active duty troops for transgender surgeries
“when we don’t have enough money to address suicide prevention, particularly in places like Alaska, where the issue of suicide with our active duty troops is particularly acute. None of these things that the Biden Pentagon is doing have anything to do with war fighting, have anything to do with lethality, or have anything to do with winning wars.”
Sullivan defended the oversight role that Republicans are providing in the Armed Services Committee to get the Pentagon back on track, and focused on lethality and winning America’s wars.
Throughout the liberal media, including the Anchorage Daily News, reporters and editors have been accusing Republicans of waging a culture war. It has become the new dog whistle phrase to unite Democrats to the battle for forcing taxpayers to pay for transgender treatments and surgeries, providing them with sex hormones, and sexualizing them before they are old enough to know what is happening.
