Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein flagged what he claimed to be a “hidden message” buried in the Trump administration’s new military recruitment ad that debuted during the White House Ultimate Fighting Championship event on Sunday, an ad, he argued, that intentionally invoked feelings of “religious terror.”
“The U.S. military’s new recruitment ad has a hidden message; that message can be captured in one simple word: ‘greatness.’ It’s stated most clearly about halfway through the ad,” Klippenstein said in a video published Sunday night.
Exactly 90 seconds long, the ad features a dramatic and intense orchestral score and a compilation of shots depicting U.S. service members in action across the globe. As noted by Klippenstein, about halfway through the ad, President Donald Trump can be heard saying the following: “the whole world will admire the unrivaled greatness of the United States military.”
“Unrivaled greatness… that’s how the military wants you to see it, in a time when most Americans already do,” Klippenstein said.
“Poll after poll shows the same thing: the military is just about the only institution most of us still trust, more than organized labor, more than the police, more even than the church. So how did this happen?”
To further argue his claim, Klippenstein flagged another moment in the ad: a brief shot of Trump pointing to munitions raining from the sky via parachutes.
“I want you to think about that for just a second: the most powerful leader in the entire world is not the focus of this ad, the military is, and he’s the one looking up at it in awe,” Klippenstein said. “That, in a nutshell, is the whole idea of this ad, which the Pentagon says is its first since rebranding as the Department of War.”
The alleged effort to depict the U.S. military as America’s most powerful and greatest institution by the Department of Defense – which, while rebranded as the Department of War by Trump, can only be officially rebranded through an act of Congress – bore similarities, Klippenstein argued, to organized religion.
“If you’ve ever stood inside one of those enormous cathedrals in Europe, you know the feeling this ad is reaching for,” Klippenstein said. “Not comfort, but something closer to a religious terror; the awe of standing very small beneath something vast and old, something that makes you feel like almost nothing at all. That feeling is the product of this ad itself.”
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