The Republican US Senate candidate for Virginia went off during a Wednesday night debate about drag queens and other diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the US military, saying service branches should recruit “alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts.”
Hung Cao, a retired Navy captain who deployed as a special operations officer to Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, had choice words about the state of the country’s armed forces during the only scheduled debate against incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine.
“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” Cao said when asked about earlier remarks he had made disparaging the Biden-Harris administration’s “growing obsession” with DEI.
“What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat ’em and ask for seconds,” he added. “Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”
Cao later tweeted out the retort from the showdown at Norfolk State University on his campaign’s X account, earning more than 2 million views.
Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, called DEI “a red herring” — despite lawmakers and independent studies linking lagging recruitment numbers and military readiness to the progressive initiatives.
“We need to do a better job of talking about the GI Bill and other benefits as well as the tremendous leadership training that you get in the military,” Kaine, who is seeking a third six-year term, responded to Cao.
Cao told The Post in August that the Pentagon’s lack of focus on being able “to train [recruits] properly” was also having an effect on benefit programs for the “warfighters” ready to die for their nation.
“We need to equip them properly and not [be] concentrating on things like pronouns, you know? We need to make sure that our warfighters can, you know, are taken care of,” he said at the time. “Like right now, do you know that one-third of our enlisted ranks are either on WIC [Women, Infants and Children supplemental nutrition program] or food stamps?” Cao said.
Republicans and other critics have targeted the DEI efforts, which some studies have shown are ineffective, for causing the Pentagon to fall short of its recruitment goals in recent years.
Between October 2022 and March 2023, the Navy even hired an active-duty drag queen as a “digital ambassador” on TikTok and Instagram to help address the lagging figures.
House Republicans later queried Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about the program, saying they were misled and told it “did not exist” before it was scrapped after making national headlines.
“Our military faces the worst recruiting crisis since the Vietnam War because young Americans don’t want to join what was once a trusted institution that has become overly politicized and hyper-focused on DEI initiatives,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) told The Post in May 2023, when introducing a separate bill to address low recruitment.
Later that year, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard revealed that they would fall short of their recruitment goals by between 10% and 25%.
Only the Marine Corps was on track to fill its ranks in 2023 — but acknowledged that just 23% of the recruitable population could meet medical, moral and mental standards for service.
GOP lawmakers have also grilled Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley in congressional hearings about pushing the so-called “woke” priorities, such as critical race theory trainings.
In a high-profile 2021 hearing, Milley had defended teaching critical race theory at the US Military Academy at West Point, saying it was important for Army cadets to comprehend “white rage.”
“I do think it’s important, actually, for those of us in uniform, to be open-minded and be widely read, and the United States Military Academy is a university, and it is important that we train and we understand,” he told members of the House Armed Services Committee.
“And I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it.”
Cao is lagging behind Kaine by more than 10 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, in a race rated “solid” Democrat by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
