Several of the military officers whose promotions are held up due to a senator’s fight with the Pentagon have supported left-wing cultural stances and diversity initiatives, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of social media posts, Pentagon materials and public footage.
Republican Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville has single-handedly blocked numerous officers’ confirmations in protest of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s directive that the military fund out-of-state travel for female troops seeking abortions, initiating a game of chicken between Tuberville and the Pentagon that shows no sign of stopping. Yet several of the candidates in line for promotion have a history of making political statements and backed or spearheaded internal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives related to race and sexuality, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of publicly available information.
“Comments by even a handful of the Biden Pentagon’s general officer nominees are instructive as to defense policy, as opposed to mere talking points,” William Thibeau, director of the American Military Project at the Center for the American Way of Life, explained to the DCNF.
“You win on what you focus on. In other words, what the commander talks about typically becomes the focus for the unit writ large,” he said.
For example, Tuberville’s hold applies to Air Force Gen. Charles. Q. Brown, who was recently nominated to replace Gen. Mark Milley as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to NBC News. Brown gained notoriety when he made a rare public statement on race in the midst of nationwide rioting and protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
In August, Brown ordered the Air Force’s recruiting wing to cultivate an applicant pool that meets racial and gender percentage quotas, a memo shows. The order was meant to ultimately increase diversity in the Air Force itself.
“I hire for diversity,” he told Air and Space Forces Magazine in 2020.
Additionally, with Brown as chief of staff, the Air Force commissioned a racial disparity review focusing on African-Americans, along with a second study of disparities between people of other ethnicities/gender identities and white, heterosexual males, according to an interview with U.S. News.
“The best way to fix what might be perceived as a problem is to do the analysis and go, ‘We’ve got some improvement to do.’ And part of that is to really take a look at areas of how we do discipline, how we do career development and how we do promotion,” Brown told the outlet.
The Secretary of Defense also nominated Air Force Brig. Gen. Scott Cain for promotion to Major General in March, shortly after Tuberville announced his hold.
As the top officer at Eglin Air Force Base in 2020, Cain issued a “unity message” to Air Force peers at other installations, encouraging them to engage their teams in conversation about the “tragedy in Minneapolis,” referring to George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020, “the unrest and pain in our country” that followed “and what all of this means for our lives and our service” as he had done with subordinate commanders at Eglin. Cain promoted tools he developed alongside Cecil Williams, the DEI director for Eglin, meant to facilitate those conversations.
“Some of the biases we carry with us, whether conscious or not, are a weakness that it’s time to change,” Cain said.
Cain oversaw the institution of a DEI office at Eglin, one of the first in the Air Force, calling it his “most significant long-standing accomplishment” in a June 2022 exit interview.
“Leaders must view the accomplishment of [diversity and inclusion] goals and objectives as an important part of their responsibilities,” states the office’s Diversity & Inclusion Strategic Plan for 2021 – 2026, which Cain personally approved.
The office conducts activities related to “affirmative employment” and “inclusionary program management,” according to the website.
“It’s time to have a conversation,” he said in a video with Williams, referencing conversations he’s had directly with troops. “Everyone on our team is coming from a different place, coming with a different perspective, and some people are coming with a bias whether it’s a conscious bias or not.”
Williams highlighted the importance of unconscious bias training, forums and times to listen to servicemembers “rant” and express their perspectives, thanking Cain for his leadership in these areas. Cain recently assumed command of the Air Force Research Laboratory, where he will be responsible for managing a research and development budget totaling $6 billion, according to a press release.
In the Army, Brig. Gen. Ronald Ragin has been waiting on his promotion to Major General and assignment as commanding general for the 21st Theater Sustainment Command, U.S. Army Europe-Africa since February.
Speaking to ROTC cadets at a university panel discussion on “why representation matters” about the the Army’s Project Inclusion diversity initiative, Ragin said, “We’re gonna work hard and we’re gonna continue to strive to make sure that we’re the most diverse force in the Army, and that will allow us to dominate and win on future battlefields.”
Project Inclusion involved listening sessions, a review of the military justice system and removal of photos from promotion boards, according to a news release.
Ragin also initiated “Mentorship Rucks” that bring together a “vastly cultural and gender-diverse group” of junior officers; on an April 1 ruck, he reiterated his support of seeing greater gender, cultural, and racial diversity among the Army’s ranks, according to a press release.
Space Force Brig. Gen. Jody Merritt served as a panelist for an industry group DEI symposium in 2021, according to a LinkedIn post. She is up for promotion to Maj. Gen as of February, according to a statement.
She also spoke under personal social media accounts about her political standings, including a Jan. 26 tweet that appeared to exhort followers to vote for stricter gun control measures. Merritt promoted a video addressing “what we’re doing in the Air Force to address the concerns of underrepresentation” of women in the service in a social media post.
“By recognizing the value of women’s participation and actively promoting their involvement, we unlock a transformative force that can reshape the world, one conflict at a time,” she wrote.
Navy Vice Adm. Jeffrey Hughes was put forward to reappointment to the same officer grade and assignment as deputy chief of staff for Capability Development, Supreme Allied Command Transformation, in May. As commander of Navy Recruiting Command, Hughes gave opening remarks at the command’s first Diversity Awareness Day in 2016, according to a media release. In 2022, as deputy chief of naval operations for warfighting development, Hughes participated in the Naval Information Force‘s inaugural DEI Summit where he emphasized the pillars of DEI throughout the force, a press release shows.
“It is incredibly important that we reflect the values that we value, but also incredibly important that we serve as an exemplar to the rest of the nation and to the rest of the world,” Hughes said. “We need exceptional talent to get after these incredible vexing strategic, operational, tactical problems and we need this exceptional talent to plan and execute complex and vital missions, period.”
And, at the Navy’s first-ever Naval Surface Force Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Symposium in April 2022, Rear Adm. Brendan McLane headlined the event with a plea for participants to spread the word of diversity, according to a press release.
“You don’t always have to agree with different perspectives, but accepting them and moving on is progress,” he said.
McLane stands to advance to the rank of Vice Adm. and assume command of Naval Surface Forces and Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet as of April.
“This is just like maintenance; it needs to be done 100% of the time,” he added.
Vice Adm. Craig Clapperton, who was nominated for reappointment and assignment as commander of U.S. Fleet Cyber Command, addressed a Navy LGBT celebration in 2018, according to a Navy news release. The number of promotions Tuberville is holding up has reached 249 and continues to grow, the latest Senate calendar dated June 26 shows. One option to break the hold is to go through each nomination one by one, but that process is time consuming and widely seen as untenable, according to Politico.
Explaining his rationale behind the hold, Tuberville tied the abortion travel policy to a wider “culture war,” with Democrats and accused the Biden administration of seeking to “inject politics” into the military in an April editorial.
“Thanks to the Biden administration’s woke appointees, we’ve seen the worst drop in recruitment in 50 years,” Tuberville wrote.
Each nominee’s military command has not responded to the DCNF’s request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
These people are garbage, they are more suited to be the democrat party toadstools. Only one mildly mentions warfighting. The purpose of the military, from the cooks and finance personnel to soldiers, and pilots is to fight and win the nations wars and protect and defend America’s interest. Not the so-called right color or gender. Definitely not people that don’t know if they are boys or girls, they are mental ill and certainly don’t need to be around weapons or in positions of responsibility. The Progressive satanist policies are destroying the military and the country as a whole.
I’m SO glad that I served when I did and don’t have to in today’s CLOWN WORLD. These ‘leaders’ can’t hold a candle to the patriots that led during the 80s and 90s. If you’re thinking about joining…DON’T DO IT! The military is rife with the malignant cancer of racism, division, and EXCLUSION. And NO…if you’re a man or woman, then you don’t get to “choose” whether or not you’re a man or woman. X + Y = GUY…DO THE MATH!
PHK THE LETTER PEOPLE!!
FJB!! TRUMP WON!! 2020 and 2022 WERE STOLEN!! MAGA!! TRUMP 2024!! ASHLI BABBITT AND ROSEANNE BOYLAND WERE MURDERED!! RELEASE THE J6 POLITICAL PRISONERS AND TAPES!!
Affirmative, Gen. Brown, like Milley, Gilday, MacKenzie, Kirby, Ryder (since when did public affairs stooges like Ryder and Kirby attain general or admiral rank????) DeAnna DeAnna Rosanna Rosanna (DeAnna Burt) do not even qualify as clown acts —- simply the DESTROYERS of national security and the US military (or Milleytary)!
Just read the after–action report on the USS Connecticut nuclear sub incident —– un—frigging—believable!!!
Standards have been reduced to almost nonexistent, no comparison to what once was!!!
Once more, DEI are communist political minder systems, unfortunately implemented at the Pentagon/DoD under the Trump Administration by covert globalist/WEFer Mark Esper —- Esper looked great on paper but then turned out to be PURE GLOBALIST —- he has since joined the Atlantic Council and Aspen Strategy Group (Yasmin Green is also a member —- she manages Google’s Jigsaw operation which was contracted by the Pentagon, after the “election” of Manchurian Joe, to track Evangelical Christians, Catholics and Trump supporters as possible “domestic terrorists”)!
Mark Esper turned out to be one of the worst SecDefs in modern history —– last decent one was Caspar Weinberger —– how we should miss him!
Really a fantasic article and that commie clown act and anti–American Cain has been exposed multiple times now for citing and quoting communist propaganda —- the item below isn’t among them but I have to address it also:
“Cain issued a “unity message” to Air Force peers at other installations, encouraging them to engage their teams in conversation about the “tragedy in Minneapolis,” referring to George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020, . . .”
When the rebranded Maoist group, Liberty Road —- now called BLM —– puts out propaganda trust the General Clown Acts like Cain to robotically repeat it!!!
Why discuss the fentanyl/mixed drug OD of a criminal in the middle of multiple criminal actions who has a past of violent crime and has served NINE prison terms —– what in bloody perdition is wrong with commie clown act Cain?!?!
Too, too much garbage in the high command of the US Milleytary today —- first began noticing this in 1996, when I started coming into contact with very superior RIF’ed former officers, male AND female, who would have been fast–tracked for higher ranks in the past but were cut loose during the Clinton Administration ——— too strange for words back then?!?!