Excerpt from podcast with Congressman Eli Lake, a Navy Seal veteran:
“When I look at this whole situation as a former warfighter myself, I’ve just been concerned about it the entire time,” Crane said of America’s involvement in foreign conflicts.
“It seems like we just go from never-ending war to never-ending war, and after five, 10, 20 years … we have to ask ourselves a couple hard questions. Was this worth the blood and treasure that we spent?”
“When you’re up here [in Washington, D.C.,] you realize how many people who have never been to war, never buried a buddy, never had to go console a Gold Star Mother,” nonetheless make military decisions, Crane said. It’s no surprise, then, that these members of Congress keep voting for war. “It’s almost as if they’ve never seen a war that they didn’t want us to be involved in.”
Trump’s return has caused Republicans to come back to their senses, especially on matters of U.S. foreign policy, he argued.
“I’m grateful for the president in trying to bring peace in the Middle East, trying to broker peace talks between Russia and Ukraine,” Crane added. The House Republican sees ending the wars as part of Trump’s larger effort “to realign us geopolitically.”
“I think a lot of what he’s doing is kinda like Monroe Doctrine 2.0 and trying to lock down the Western Hemisphere, and at the same time trying to prevent us from this idea that we should be some world police force,” he said.
Pulling off this pivot will require the Trump administration to purge the military of woke ideologies that not only undercut its lethality but push the U.S. into foreign wars.
Video excerpt: Lake talks about meeting with woke admirals in a SCIF who said, “diversity is our strength.”:
During his military career, Crane said he ”watched the military become what it’s become and just completely inundated with DEI.”
At one point in the discussion, Crane recalled a meeting in a Capitol intelligence facility where Navy admirals repeated leftist slogans when Republicans asked simple questions about military funding for DEI.
“I’m very concerned for many of the people that I know within the military just because we’ve gone from having a military that was focused on lethality to, in many ways, a military that’s often distracted by many of these woke cultural agendas like diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Crane added.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is the change agent the military badly needed, Crane suggested. “He’s really, in my opinion, changing the culture, not only with eliminating a lot of the DEI and woke programs,” but by “showing our troops that he’s willing to get down and dirty and work out with them and hang out.”
“That’s not something you see a lot,” Crane confided. “That’s not something you see a lot from generals or admirals, let alone the secretary of defense.”
Podcast:
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