Former President Donald Trump posted a video of a web ad attacking the Biden-Harris administration for allegedly seeking to create a “woke” military more concerned about LGBTQ representation than being “tough.”
Trump — who like other Republicans, has seized upon LGBTQ issues as one way to appeal to the party’s socially conservative base voters — has previously made the same attack at some of his campaign rallies.
The ad compares two conflicting “visions” of the military in Trump’s view. For Trump’s military vision, it includes clips from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 war epic Full Metal Jacket. For Kamala Harris, meanwhile, it depicts a military that cherishes and respects the LGBTQ community, which the former president considers ruinous.
Ironically, Full Metal Jacket is an anti-war, anti-military movie, as the drill sergeant shown — R. Lee Ermey — abusing members of the platoon meets his fate when a recruit (Vincent D’Onofrio) he has pushed to the breaking point shoots him dead before committing suicide.
To show what the military would look like under “Comrade Kamala,” the ad utilizes a clip of Admiral Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary of Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, wishing LGBTQ military members a happy Pride Month and saying, “Let’s make it a summer of Pride.”
The ad also uses clips from what appear to be three separate TikTok videos from out naval officer Joshua Kelley, who performs in drag as “Harpy Daniels.”
Kelley, who has previously performed as Harpy during events organized by the Navy’s Morale, Welfare and Recreation Department, announced in 2022 they had been chosen as a “Digital Ambassador” by the Navy to help boost recruitment.
By deploying clips of a prominent transgender woman and a drag queen, Trump’s implied message is that a military under a Democratic administration fosters an atmosphere where people are “weak and gay.”
“WE WILL NOT HAVE A WOKE MILITARY!” Trump wrote in a caption on X featuring the video clip.
“Trump has twisted and profoundly distorted Kubrick’s powerful anti-war film into a perverse, homophobic, and manipulative tool of propaganda,” the film’s star Matthew Modine told Entertainment Weekly.
Republicans have frequently claimed that the military, including leaders at the Department of Defense, are overly concerned with diversity and sensitivity training. As a result, they claim, the military has degraded its readiness to go to war and become “soft,” with rank-and-file service members more concerned with political correctness and left-wing social activism than defending America from external threats.
Congressional Republicans have proposed amendments to Department of Defense funding bills seeking to make the Pentagon’s existing ban on drag performances on military bases more permanent.
Some Republicans, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have even called on the military to reinstate the ban on LGBTQ service members, claiming that their mere presence in the ranks is resulting in recruiting problems for all branches of the service.
DeSantis’s claim is based on stereotypes of conservative-leaning Americans so blinded by anti-LGBTQ hatred and so inflexible that they are allegedly incapable of serving alongside any service member who does not ascribe to their same worldview or come from the same background.
DeSantis is not the only person to employ the trope — much of right-wing social media frequently seeks to portray “real” military members — and by extension, Trump, should be become commander-in-chief — as hypermasculine “alpha males” who are ready to protect Americans at a moment’s notice.
That same view has also extended beyond the military, with Republicans frequently asserting that any male who votes for Democrats isn’t a “real man.”
A gay Holocaust survivor is comparing former President Donald Trump's autocratic tendencies and propaganda tactics to former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
With the help of her children and grandchildren, the 88-year-old woman, known as Grandma Elli, was able to familiarize herself with TikTok and start posting observations about the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
"I've been around a long time and seen many crises, but never like this one in our country," she said in her first video. "As far as I can see, there's really only one question to answer as we decide who we want for our next president, and that is: Do we want to continue our democracy, civil liberties, and free elections, or do we want a 'wannabe dictator,' by his own words, who will go after our freedoms one by one, dismantle them, and then take vengeance on all who disagreed with him?"
Charles Moran, the president of the Log Cabin Republicans, penned an editorial in Newsweek slamming the Democratic presidential ticket as the "wrong choice" for LGBTQ Americans.
The leader of the nation's gay Republican group attacks Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as extreme and beholden to the interests of left-wing interest groups.
"Their agenda goes far beyond what our community has sought for decades, which is equality for LGBT Americans under the law," Moran writes. "In reality, Harris and Walz are crusaders for a small but powerful cabal of the LGBT Left which wants to erase the concept of biological sex from society, expose young children to overtly sexualized and ideological content, and strip parents of their rights to make critical decisions about their children."
Corey DeAngelis, an education activist known for his anti-"woke" crusading and rhetoric expressing hostility toward the LGBTQ community, reportedly appeared in two pornographic films aimed at gay audiences.
DeAngelis is a self-described "school choice evangelist," espousing charter schools, taxpayer-funded vouchers to send children to private, often religiously-affiliated schools, and homeschooling as better alternatives than public schools.
In 2014, he apparently was featured in two films for the website GayHoopla under the name "Seth Rose."
DeAngelis did not engage in any one-on-one intimate encounters with other performers. Rather, he performed a solo masturbation scene, as well as the "jerk-off race," a thundering masturbation competition with three other performers who only touch themselves.
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