Ep. 134: Who’s safeguarding the legacy of the ‘Greatest Generation’ on Memorial Day?
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Hello, and welcome to Jonathan Tobin Daily. I'm JNS Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin. Now let's get started. Eighty years after the end of World War II, the number of Allied veterans of that conflict is dwindling quickly. Dubbed in America as the greatest generation for having survived the Great Depression and then defeating Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan, they have been lauded both for their sacrifices and the values they seem to exemplify.

If the 20th century was the American century, it was largely because of the American people's willingness to do what it took to defeat the greatest challenges to Western civilization. Yet with that generation largely gone and the heroism of a good war that all Americans could support now part of a history that few who are living understand, let alone remember, they face other deadly threats to their civilization.

The question facing their children and grandchildren on Memorial Day 2025 is not so much whether we're honoring their legacy as much as we should, but whether they are ready to do what is needed to both preserve the American Republic and the West. That choice is made all the starker by the fact that Memorial Day weekend is also the anniversary of the killing of George Floyd.

The reaction to that brutal police killing five years ago seemed, at least momentarily, to signal the belief that the basic values of freedom that had sustained Americans throughout the 20th century was now to be replaced by new, woke ideas that turned them on their head.

The increasing influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, coupled with the mostly peaceful demonstrations and riots that followed, symbolized not just outrage about a crime or belief in the myth that African Americans were being hunted and killed by police,

It was also a rejection of the ideals of American freedom and their replacement by toxic ideologies like critical race theory, intersectionality, and settler colonialism that saw the United States as an irredeemably racist nation. Instead of battling for equal opportunity and a colorblind society, has had the heroes of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s that achieved so much progress towards justice.

Progressives now sought to impose new doctrines rooted in the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, that condemned Americans to more division and a never-ending racial conflict. One of the most obvious deleterious results of that shift was the uptick in anti-Semitism that was enabled by a dominant ideology that viewed Jews and Israel as white oppressors.

That was something that became even more shockingly obvious after the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. The surge in Jew hatred in the United States that followed was inextricably linked to the way that the BLM summer had mainstreamed that toxic and false idea.

It culminated in the murders of two young Israeli embassy employees last week by a pro-Palestine activist immersed in such notions. It is a daunting thought that in eight decades, the America that defeated Nazism was now dealing with an unprecedented rise in Jew hatred, including acts of violence.

Yet as Americans honor their past heroes, the sad truth is that the United States faces multiple threats in 2025. One is from an increasingly aggressive communist Chinese regime that imagines itself to be the primary superpower rival to the United States. The other is from the bizarre red-green alliance of woke Marxists and Islamists. It's not the situation many Americans anticipated a quarter century ago.

By the year 2000s, Americans could look back on the previous century and speak proudly of their defeating not just Germany twice and the Japanese, but also the ideologies that had threatened to destroy the West—Nazism, fascism, and communism. But the popular notion in the 1990s about the end of history in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall was a terrible mistake.

Many Americans thought that they were coasting into the 21st century as the sole global superpower with no real threats to their way of life or their nation's strategic interests. The Bill Clinton presidency was an era in which Americans thought they had a peace dividend to squander and nothing much to worry about on the international stage.

The first rude awakening came soon after, on September 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists made clear that even if the United States didn't recognize that a civilizational battle was being fought with Islamists, that conflict couldn't be ignored. The response to that from the George W. Bush administration was a much-needed counterattack against the Islamists that unfortunately morphed into two forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—

whose goals was not merely to defeat a strategic threat, but to impose democracy on the Middle East, much as the United States had done in Germany and Japan after their defeats. That crusade may have been well-intentioned. However, it was a fool's errand in a region whose dominant Islamic culture seems incompatible with American democracy. During the Barack Obama presidency, it was followed by something that was, if possible, even worse—

Appeasement of Islamist Iran rooted in the belief that America was a sinful aggressor rather than the chief defender of freedom further undermined U.S. interests. That American retreat wasn't entirely halted during President Donald Trump's first term as his administration was riven by internal divisions and hamstrung by conspiracy theories about Russian collusion and a partisan impeachment.

The election of a mentally declining Joe Biden in 2020 marked a return to Obama's foreign policy with the added encumbrance of that administration's full embrace of woke doctrines. On top of that, it deliberately allowed America's borders to be overrun by what can fairly be described as an invasion of millions of illegal immigrants who have strained the nation's resources, materially damaged its working class, and brought drugs and gang violence into the country.

That leaves Americans with a clear choice, as a more focused Trump 2.0 administration has begun waging a much-needed war on leftist ideologies that have been destroying America from within. It's also coping with a variety of international threats abroad, though without the economic and industrial capacity to wage war, as previous American leaders had always assumed they could on multiple fronts.

It is in that context that Trump's commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point should be viewed, coming as it did just before the Memorial Day weekend.

Most of the legacy media and corporate outlets blasted Trump for his usual improvisational unorthodox digressions, his use of the occasion to promote his political agenda, though the same voices had no problem with Biden giving what amounted to a campaign speech in the same venue a year earlier, as well as for the substance. The latter is what ought to interest us.

particularly so on a weekend when Americans look back on their past struggles, and they were also marking the fifth anniversary of the Floyd killing and the BLM summer that followed it. Trump's remarks focused on his effort to rid the military academies of woke influences that had arisen in the last decade or more.

Like he did in his recent policy speech in Saudi Arabia, the president stated his commitment to rejecting Bush's futile and costly democracy promotion, as well as the appeasement of Obama and Biden. More to the point, these words were especially apt at West Point, which has, like the other service academies, been vulnerable to the influence of BLM and DEI.

The U.S. Department of Defense had embraced wokeness to an alarming degree under Biden, though Trump has ordered that to be changed. As he stated in his commencement address, the job of the U.S. Armed Forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, or to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun. The military's job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and anyplace.

That sticks in the craw of the less established establishment in academia, in addition to the DEI bureaucrats and professors who impose these ideas on the service academies, just as they've done in American colleges and universities. That leads to the question of which approach is a better way to defend the legacy of the greatest generation, as well as of all the generations that have served the United States.

Think what you like of Trump and his outlier personality and mode of expression. But if you believe in preserving the values of the American republic that rose to dominance in the 20th century and defending its citizens' freedom, the answer seems obvious.

The only way that America can hope to fend off the Chinese and Islamist threats is if it is equally prepared to reject wokeism and the neo-Marxist DEI influence that has arisen to have such influence throughout culture, education, government, and society in the last decade.

A willingness to root out these pernicious radical myths also provides the sole path for putting a stop to the surge of violent anti-Semitism that would have been unimaginable in 1945 or at any point in American history until recently. And contrary to the narrative of the left, the president's policies and governments are no threat to democracy, while those who think that anything is permissible to defeat him truly are.

Taking pot shots at Trump's idiosyncratic approach to public discourse and governance has become second nature for many Americans. Yet even if you find his trademark red Make America Great cap,

Even if you find his trademark, make America great cap and manga policies off-putting, his clarion call at West Point to reject toxic left-wing ideologies is an appropriate message for a country that is at a crossroads in history. If it is to fend off global threats and rid itself of anti-Semitism, then America must also first defeat neo-Marxist wokeism.

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