By Senator Marco Rubio
This year’s Pride month reveals more clearly than ever how “wokeness ” undermines national institutions.
The essential purpose of these institutions is to serve the national interest. If they take pride in anything, we expect them to take pride in America.
And we expect them to forswear loyalty to anything apart from that — to put the public good ahead of party and president.
Yet this June, virtually every one of them will join in the rituals of the Left’s new civic religion at the cost of their mission and strength.
I have been warning about this for years, and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and I sounded the alarm on some of the most grotesque examples of it last November.
Our “Woke Warfighters” report cataloged the ways in which America’s armed forces have been infiltrated and undermined — not by enemy spies but by a fanatical ideology at odds with the common defense and divorced from national security objectives.
These include instruction in critical race theory at U.S. service academies, forced affirmation of service members’ “gender transitions,” and cringeworthy, virtue-signaling recruitment campaigns.
To address this, we introduced legislation to defund the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats at the Pentagon. Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) and I also introduced legislation to prohibit anyone with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria from serving in the military, with limited exceptions.
Shining a light on the military’s left-wing excesses is essential. We need to push the Pentagon to refocus on protecting America from foreign threats and building a more lethal fighting force.
But over the past few months, the military has only become more “woke,” even as threats on the global stage have grown more dangerous.
The latest example? The U.S. Navy has selected a TikTok drag queen to be a “ digital ambassador .” The move is supposedly designed to attract socially liberal recruits from Generation Z.
But does anyone really think this type of advertising will motivate young people to sign up and serve? If anything, it will exacerbate the military’s recruitment crisis. Appointing a drag queen digital ambassador is clearly nothing more than a kowtow to the Democratic Party’s activist base.
Sadly, that base is also weakening the State Department. Last year, the United States funded a left-wing organization that supports prostitution in Colombia and hosted a film festival featuring incest and pedophilia in Portugal, all using taxpayer dollars and in the name of LGBT rights.
Now, the State Department tells its employees that it will “reward good behavior that advances [diversity, equity, and inclusion] core values” with superior pay and assignments and that employees who do not advance “wokeness” “in words and actions” will be denied promotion.
Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) and I have collected these examples and more and published them in a new report called “‘Diversity’ over Diplomacy.” It is vital that the public and policymakers become aware of this insanity because it is already harming our standing in the world.
Shortly after the Biden administration rebuked the Solomon Islands for its traditional views on marriage, for instance, the Solomon Islands signed a mutual security agreement with Communist China. The Solomon Islands’ prime minister then rebuffed a commemoration of the Battle of Guadalcanal and refused American ships the right to dock at the islands’ ports.
The takeaway here is obvious: The more our government embraces left-wing nonsense and tries to export it across the globe, the more possible partners will turn to our adversaries in our stead.
While the Biden administration offers climate grants and drag performances, Beijing promises easy money and no lectures on social engineering. Unless the State Department changes course, there will be more cases like that of the Solomon Islands.
I have no wish to defame America’s military service members or diplomats. I know that both the armed forces and the State Department are filled with genuine patriots.
But if we want them to stay that way, we cannot ignore the threat posed by left-wing ideologues in positions of leadership.
When “wokeness” co-opts national institutions, it does more than spread the creeds of Pride and CRT — it also distracts those institutions from their essential purpose.
The greater the distraction, the more dangerous the world will become for America.
Marco Rubio is Florida’s senior U.S. senator.
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