It’s not your father’s Navy. The new woke version of the U.S. military includes a program that uses digital ambassadors to help boost sagging recruitment numbers. In this case, the Navy hired Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley as its first digital ambassador. His stage name is Harpy Daniels.

Kelley is one of five digital ambassadors hired by the Navy. He is 24 years old and has been doing drag since he was a teenager. At the age of 16, he began watching RuPaul’s Drag Race and says he became inspired by the drag queens on that show. He identifies as non-binary and joined the Navy in 2016. None of the digital ambassadors were paid and no promotional or recruiting materials with the ambassadors exist. Hmm. If it is such a great program, what are they hiding? How do they recruit without recruitment materials?

The U.S. Navy hired this non-binary drag queen as a “digital ambassador” to try to recruit people pic.twitter.com/l3LIEtndVD

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 2, 2023

Are there Gen Z men and women out there who are waiting for a drag queen to recruit them into the Navy? Are there people out there who see this on social media and say, ok. I’m in. Maybe. It’s a whole new woke world out there, so we’re told, and the current Secretary of Defense has made it clear that he is on board with it.

The Navy expects to fall 8,000 short of its recruitment goals this year. The digital ambassador program has ended. It ran from October 2022 through March 2023. Officials are working to assess its effectiveness. It is funny how we are only now seeing stories about the drag queen hire, now that the program has run its course. It’s like the Navy knows the kind of criticism it is opening itself up for with this program, or something.

Kelley said he has experienced harassment from “Christian extremists.”

“An effort is, indeed, being made to connect recruiting to the interests and concerns of Gen-Z,” Lt. Ian Clark and PO Third Class Kyle Atkinson, U.S. Navy wrote for the U.S. Naval Institute journal in January 2023.

Kelley said he faced harassment from outside the military after he was scheduled to perform at a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) event at Langley Joint Air Force Base in the summer of 2022 that “caused an uproar to many conservatives and Christian extremists.”

“I’m an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community and being able to do drag is not just for me, but a tribute to many service members who were kicked out, harassed, bullied, or worse for being openly gay during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. It shows representation, and that is truly needed for a culture and organization that has shunned us for so long,” he told the USS Constitution Museum.

Only a small percentage of young people meet the requirements of the Navy and are so inclined to join. So, it launched a series of ads tailored to Gen Z. They ran on social media platforms and on television and video streaming services, according to the U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) News. That percentage is 2%.

“An effort is, indeed, being made to connect recruiting to the interests and concerns of Gen-Z,” Lt. Ian Clark and PO Third Class Kyle Atkinson, U.S. Navy wrote for the USNI journal in January 2023, citing a prominent Diversity and Inclusion section that appeared on the Navy recruiting website’s front page at the time.

The military is checking off identity boxes in hopes of enticing young people to join the service. It doesn’t get much more diverse than a non-binary drag queen, does it? The only thing to make him more diverse would be if he was a person of color. I guess we’ll know if the program works when the Navy reports its recruitment numbers at the end of the year.

The question is whether or not this new level of wokeness is one of the factors for a slowdown in recruitment, a reason that men and women aren’t interested in joining the military these days. One panel suggests as much.

In March, a National Independent Panel on Military Service and Readiness report suggested poor recruiting was, at least in part, a result of the military’s new woke policies.

It found that DEO initiatives have risked ‘supplanting the US military’s culture of warfighting with a new culture of DEI promotion and compliance.’

I suspect most people think as I do – I don’t care if someone wants to play dress-up on their own time. I sure as hell, though, want to know that our military ranks are filled with men and women properly trained and ready to concentrate on defending our country. If they are battle-ready and still able to perform drag in their off hours, go for it. Otherwise, it seems a bit odd to use a drag queen as a symbol of the Navy to recruit new people. I could be wrong. Maybe it’s a brilliant marketing ploy. We’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, China loves this stuff.