A proposal to use Charlie Kirk as a military recruiting tool, despite his never having served in any branch of the United States Armed Forces, presents a host of problems.
That is the opinion of MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem in a column on Saturday, who noted there is some resistance within the Pentagon since the proposal was leaked.
According to a report from NBC News on Thursday, “The idea would be to frame the recruiting campaign as a national call to service, the officials said. Possible slogans that Pentagon leaders have discussed include 'Charlie has awakened a generation of warriors,' according to the officials."
Reflecting on that, Aleem wrote, “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.”
Calling the proposal “chilling,” he added, “Using Kirk’s death as a rallying cry and his organization for recruitment could never be interpreted as politically neutral.”
“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,” he wrote. “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.”
He suggested that such a move could lead to a loss of faith in the military as being a politics-free zone.
“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,” he concluded.
You can read more here.