Stanley McChrystal: belief

Transcript context

…You teach at Yale, just to be clear, so you come in contact with the woke, yes? I do. Let me say first that everybody defines woke differently. There’s a certain extremist level of that, where people have views that are far different than mine. But I think the idea of understanding that race and other things have been thought of in a pretty limited way in the United States for a very long time, questioning how things have been done in many of our cultural habits, is necessary. From that standpoint, if somebody wanted to say, “Is Stan McChrystal woke?” I’d have to say “Probably I am.” Taking that, I think what we need to do is tell people that the common defense of America is every American’s responsibility. It’s not the warrior class. It’s not a limited group of people with big biceps and maybe small brains — in the minds of some people — who are willing to go out and fight foreign wars. It’s got to be young people from every family that ought to reflect America. If you hold a mirror up to the face of the US military, you ought to see our nation. If you don’t see our nation, then you have a problem long term. Teaching now at Yale, what have you learned from that teaching about how to improve military recruitment? Because those are a lot of students who won’t apply, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.