The Dictatorship
Inside the Pentagon’s disturbing potential plan to attract military recruits
Pentagon leaders are reportedly considering using the assassination of MAGA youth activist Charlie Kirk as the basis for a military recruitment campaign. It’s a horrible idea: It would encourage right-wing activists to think of Kirk’s death as a reason to take up arms, and further politicize the armed forces at a time when the president is already using the military as a tool for domestic repression. Of course, the further politicization of the military would be the point of any such effort.
NBC News, citing two officials familiar with the planning, reports that the campaign would “encourage young people to honor the legacy” of Kirk and frame it as a “national call to service.” The officials told NBC News that the Pentagon leaders have discussed as a possible slogan: “Charlie has awakened a generation of warriors.”
Using Kirk’s death as a rallying cry and his organization for recruitment could never be interpreted as politically neutral.
If this plan were enacted, then it would not only use Kirk as a symbol for attracting recruits, but also possibly tap into the infrastructure of his huge activist outfit, Turning Point USA, to do so. Turning Point USA has chapters at high schools and universities across the nation and aims to organize students around right-wing causes. Its voter mobilization operations are formidable: President Donald Trump credited Kirk with part of the surge in his popularity with young voters in the 2024 election. NBC News reports that Pentagon leaders are considering using the organization’s chapters as “military recruitment centers,” which could mean “inviting recruiters to be present at events or advertising for the military at the chapters.”
It’s not clear if the plans will be carried out, and NBC News reports that the plan is receiving some pushback within the Pentagon. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement to NBC News: “The media is so desperate to attack this administration’s success that they are now inventing lies about our recruitment efforts. Leadership matters, and under the strong leadership of President Trump and Secretary [Pete] Hegseth men and women are coming out in droves to serve this great nation.”
While the numbers have ticked upward in the last few years, the U.S. military has dealt with serious long-term recruitment challenges. I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, given that the U.S. military in the postwar era is mostly used as an instrument for global policing and imperial aggression rather than national defense. But this particular Pentagon plan is more chilling than it otherwise would be because it’s reportedly being discussed as Trump is striving to turn the military into a domestic policing power in cities including Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and implying that right-wing political violence is acceptable.
Using Kirk’s death as a rallying cry and his organization for recruitment could never be interpreted as politically neutral. Kirk did not serve in the armed forces — so recruitment into the military would not “honor his legacy.” He was a far-right pundit and activist who led the youth wing of Trump’s movement, and invoking his death to activate a new generation of “warriors” would cast the U.S. military as a project of the right. And that’s what Trump has already been doing. He’s been using deceptive pretexts to expand his power and send the military into cities governed by Democratic mayors to deal with matters that should be dealt with by local law enforcement, and to suppress progressive protesters he deems “insurrectionists.”
The consideration of this plan also comes as the Trump administration has sought to turn Kirk into a martyr-like figure and suppress free speech of Americans who disagree with that effort. Hegseth is leading a crackdown on speech in the military, hunting for and reportedly firing service members that he deems to have said something offensive about Kirk after his assassination. ABC suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely after Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to “take action” against Disney and ABC in response to Kimmel’s joke about Kirk’s shooter. after he commented on the political orientation of Hegseth’s shooter. If the military makes Kirk the model for the kind of American it wants to join the military, then it’s naturally going to draw in people who are politically sympathetic to Kirk. Such a campaign would also condition the service members who are already in the military to think their service requires loyalty to political ideology instead of the law.
In a democracy, the military is meant to be an apolitical institution, and servicemembers swear to support and defend the Constitution — not a specific party or politician. But Trump keeps taking steps to make the military an extension of his own personal ideological project and turn it against the laws and norms that have helped keep the U.S. remarkably stable as a democracy, by global standards. Trump would not be honoring Kirk’s life by using his horrific killing as a tool for recruitment. He’d be exploiting it.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.