BUCK: The military is coming under a lot of social justice pressure these days, as you know. There’s a lot of experimentation going on by leftists who believe that there should be social engineering within the military. We should be focused on things like “diversity” and “inclusion” while China, for example, earlier this week it came out, was building out in the desert-full-scale and mobile replicas of U.S. aircraft carriers because they want to start practicing the usage of anti-ship missiles on moving targets.

They get good enough… Remember, if we’re gonna, let’s say, intervene in a situation where China militarily goes after Taiwan, which I think is still… There’s a lot of open questions about, one, will they do it — and, two, what would we do if they did? But assuming U.S. military intervention, it would be first and foremost a naval intervention. You have our carrier group.

You have surface craft that would deploy, and so anti-ship missiles are a serious threat to them. And if the Chinese get long enough range missiles and get good enough at firing them and evading counter measures, we could be in for a really rough situation. And here’s Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA, former secretary of state under Trump warning everybody that our focus these days sometimes for active duty from the Pentagon planning perspective, is not where it needs to be.

POMPEO: It’s more than embarrassing on the world stage. Our adversaries watch that and see weakness. They see people who aren’t serious. They see people who aren’t determined. Precisely the opposite of what we did for four years. It feels a lot more like the Carter administration in terms of how they view America as a danger to the world and apologize everywhere they go. We need to get serious.

Our adversaries see that the Biden Admin is focused on diversity and inclusion in the military and flying jets with green energy, while they are focused on building out a military that can undo our republic. https://t.co/VnpgkSv2T8

— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) November 11, 2021

You just tripped through the Russians, the Chinese, the North Korea’s, Iranians. You just tripped through all of our adversaries, these adversaries can see that we’re focused on diversity and inclusion in our military, we’re focused on trying to fly our jets with green energy, and they’re focused on how to build out a military that can undo our republic. We need an administration that is serious about putting America first, not America last, as they seem to have done. Prioritizing climate change as America’s most significant national security threat is an enormous mistake.

BUCK: It’s crazy, Clay. It’s, frankly, crazy.

CLAY: Yeah, there’s no doubt, and this is what I always say: Wokeness is a luxury of freedom. You can be offended by comedians and the jokes that they make. You can be upset with word choice. You can be focused on your military needing to be diverse and inclusive when you aren’t worried about getting your ass kicked or you aren’t worried about whether or not you’re gonna be able to find food to put on the table.

What most of the woke universe, which are communists, don’t recognize, is capitalism has given them the luxury to be woke. Wokeness is one of the most premier luxuries that exists in the world because it presupposes that things that are actually dangerous, by and large, are taken care of. And it is why it’s so infuriating in general to see this virus attaching itself to all American cultural institutions.

And it ties back in with what I was saying earlier, Buck: The mantra of many of these groups should be to do less. Don’t respond to these woke terrorists and accede to their demands. Ignore them in an effort to delegitimize them instead of interacting with them and allowing them to dictate, as too often happens, American policy.

Only 25% or so of people who are active on Twitter in the United States. That’s one in four — and only about 10% of that 25%, that’s one in 50, actually regularly post. So we’re letting a tiny subset of America dictate our policy, and that policy is actually gonna put us at risk against our adversaries who are going to take advantage of our weaknesses.

BUCK: Well, the people in charge right now, it’s not just the Twitterati, the actual decision-makers.

CLAY: They’re listening to them.

BUCK: The commander-in-chief, they believe this stuff. I mean, they think that it is essential for the military to confront climate change as the enemy.

CLAY: It’s a good question. Do you think they believe it, or do you think they’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t say they believe it?

BUCK: I go back and forth. It’s very much for me like what you have with people that want to mask up their kids. Is it ’cause they’re worried for the kids, or is it ’cause they’re worried for themselves as adults that are too cowardly to just go about their lives. I think it’s a mix. I think there are some people —

CLAY: Who are true believers.

BUCK: — who believe that climate change will wipe out the human species. They live with this bizarre world. It’s really a modern-day superstition of some kind. It’s like a primitive religion where people used to worship different parts of the earth, the trees and the rocks and the sky, and instead they’re worshiping Mother Earth here. They’re worshiping this notion that we have to save the planet from our CO2 emissions.

For everyone, just remember, you breathe out CO2. (chuckles) We’re actually at a point we have people that think that the basic processes of human respiration are somehow adding to the destruction of the planet as a place where we could live. It’s insane. But it also shows lack of focus when you’re talking about a military and from the Pentagon top brass on down.

These kinds of things can have really severe consequences. You even go back to the earliest days of, say, the First World War and the French leadership who were very arrogant and thought that they understood things much better than they did in the world around them, and sent people in large numbers to their deaths with catastrophically bad plans and bad ideas. So when the leadership is going off on tangents about diversity and inclusion and fighting climate change, Clay, we do need to be concerned, because we will have to confront another threat as a nation in the future. And it’s not gonna be climate change.

CLAY: Well, that’s why I’m so concerned about Joe Biden in the days and weeks and months ahead. We see him declining on a day-to-day basis. It’s not gonna get better and our adversaries are gonna take advantage of him. I don’t have any doubt.