Navy SEAL Robert J. O’Neill, who was on the mission to kill Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden, is blasting the U.S. Navy for using a drag queen to recruit new sailors into service.
On Monday, The Daily Caller’s Micaela Burrow reported the Navy had recruited Joshua Kelley — an active-duty drag queen who goes by the stage name Harpy Daniels and identifies as non-binary — to be a “Navy Digital Ambassador.” According to the report, the Digital Ambassador pilot program ran from October 2022 to March 2023 and was designed to “explore the digital environment to reach a wide range of potential candidates” for military recruitment.
O’Neill — a decorated combat veteran who served for eight years as a member of SEAL Team Six and has been awarded dozens of accolades for his service — responded to the report on Twitter, saying he “can’t believe [he] fought for this bullsh-t.”
“Alright. The U.S. Navy is now using an enlisted sailor Drag Queen as a recruiter,” he wrote. “I’m done. China is going to destroy us.”
O’Neill isn’t the only veteran to condemn the military for its moronic embrace of drag queens, either. In one tweet, Kurt Schlichter, a Townhall.com columnist and retired Army colonel, predicted that America is “going to lose the next war” it’s involved in.
“My Navy father would have been appalled, but then he was in a Navy that won wars and didn’t run ships into each other,” he added in another post.
My Navy father would have been appalled, but then he was in a Navy that won wars and didn’t run ships into each other. https://t.co/jtvvnvkgJq
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) May 3, 2023
Retired Navy Rear Admiral and Texas GOP Rep. Ronny Jackson expressed similar disgust, tweeting “Who on EARTH would be persuaded to join [the military] after watching” Kelley’s drag videos.
“Biden’s SICK SICK SICK woke agenda for our military needs to END NOW!!” he said.
Veterans such as First TV host Jesse Kelly and other prominent conservatives echoed similar sentiments.
The Navy’s use of a drag queen as a “digital ambassador” comes amid reports the military is predicted to miss its recruiting targets for the 2023 fiscal year. Last month, The Military Times revealed that the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Army are projecting recruiting shortfalls in the “thousands” this year. While the Navy is estimated to fall roughly 6,000 recruits short of its goal, the Army and Air Force are projected to miss theirs by 10,000 and 3,400, respectively.
As The Federalist previously reported, the Defense Department has been pushing military leadership to adopt discriminatory “DEI” ideology since President Joe Biden took office. DEI — which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion — is a divisive and poisonous ideology that dismisses merit to discriminate based on characteristics such as skin color and sexual preferences. Individuals who qualify for a certain position due to their merits but don’t meet the discriminating entity’s goal of being more “diverse” are passed over in favor of those who meet the preferred identitarian standards.
A few months after Biden took office, for example, U.S. Naval leadership was instructed to “lead and oversee all DEI efforts across the Department to synchronize key policies and initiatives … and to develop a strategy to advance DEI across the enterprise.”