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When Personal Benefits Come at the Cost of Collective Harm

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 02 March 2026 Hits: 104

A Message to Young People Considering Military Enlistment

March 2, 2026 / NNOMY staff / National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth - Many young people think about joining the military because the benefits are real: steady pay, health coverage, college tuition, job training, and a sense of direction at a time when life can feel uncertain. These are powerful incentives, especially when school is expensive, jobs are unstable, and families are under financial pressure. Recruiters know this, and they speak directly to those needs.

But there is a deeper question beneath the surface—one that every young person deserves the chance to consider honestly: What does it mean to accept personal benefits that may require participating in actions that cause harm to others? This is not a question about patriotism or politics. It is a question about moral agency, and about the kind of life you want to build for yourself.

Modern systems of violence do not depend on monstrous individuals. They depend on ordinary people who have been persuaded that their private needs—income, stability, a mortgage, a sense of belonging—can excuse their participation in actions that inflict extraordinary harm on others. This is the quiet moral transaction at the heart of many atrocities: the conversion of personal benefit into a shield against ethical responsibility. The question is not why institutions commit violence; institutions have clear incentives. The question is why individuals inside those institutions come to believe that their own survival or comfort can justify participating in the destruction of human life, including the lives of children.

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Trump’s Sick Campaign to Gamify Violence

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 16 February 2026 Hits: 88

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February 16, 2026 / Grace Segers, Tori Otten / New Republic - Last November, during his address before McDonald’s investors, President Donald Trump—as he is wont to do during public speeches—went on one of his weird tangents. “And that plane went ‘pshh,’ like this,” he continued, diving his hand downward in an accompanying gesture. “You know, when it drops a bomb, it goes down very steeply, because that gives it a better angle, and, you know, more speed for the bomb.”

It was a characteristically glib illustration for Trump, as he narrated the experience of watching military planes drop bombs on Iran. The planes were described not in terms of the damage of their payload but rather by the sound they made as they levered inexorably downward. By now, we’re used to the way the president’s mind might lock onto something loud or shiny he sees on a screen, especially if those images provoke his enthusiasm or anger. But his play-by-play descriptions of bombs bursting in air is actually something his administration and his allies have long encouraged Americans to do: view their biggest atrocities through a gamified lens.

One demographic may be particularly susceptible to this kind of incitement, one for whom targeting an otherized population is viewed more as a game than as state-sanctioned violence: lonely, angry young men.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump made a concerted effort to market himself to this cohort. He appeared on multiple podcasts popular in the “manosphere,” a community that promotes misogyny and (often white) male supremacy. Since taking office a second time, Trump and his allies have continued to gamify many of their policy decisions, in a campaign to encourage their audience to transfer their online anger to the real world.

As they are increasingly siloed online, it becomes easier for young men to distance themselves from others, viewing all other perspectives as illegitimate or unimportant. If your experience is the only true version of reality, then other people become NPCs, or “nonplayable characters”—not individuals but mere background actors populating the scenes in your everyday life.

“You’re the protagonist in the same way that a player character in a game might be,” said Adrienne Massanari, an associate professor of communications at American University.

This perspective is frequently encouraged by the administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given his missions names such as “Midnight Hammer” and “Southern Spear,” phrases that sound more like weapons in a game than actual military operations. (Hegseth also has a tattoo that reads “Deus Vult,” a slogan adopted by the far right that was popularized by the grand strategy computer game Crusader Kings II.) And Trump, of course, continues to enthusiastically describe military strikes with the use of sound effects, as if he were watching an action flick rather than bombs dropping on human beings.

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Counter-recruitment webinar on Sat, Mar 21st -- RSVP

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 16 February 2026 Hits: 51

Dear Friends:

These are trying times. DHS agencies and the military are invading our communities. Our military is waging war or threatening war on multiple fronts.

Meanwhile, in order to maintain such an active presence on the world stage, the military needs more recruits. Recruiters are appearing at our schools, community meetings, social media, on our phones, everywhere it seems.

At the same time, the number of groups actively involved in counter military recruitment has plummeted. The National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) hopes to push against that trend and spark activist groups into action. We cannot wait three years for a change. Too much is at stake.

We are planning a webinar March 21 and we invite you to participate. This will be a round table discussion of ways in which you can become involved in counter recruiting. We will be talking about tabling at high schools, speaking to high school classrooms, forming peace clubs, leafleting at schools, community involvement, peaceful career opportunities, the need for social media campaigns. Each area will be presented by people that have been deeply involved in this work for a significant period.

We hope you can join us: Saturday, March 21, 11 – 12:30 PST/12 – 1:30 PM MST/1 – 2:30 CST/ 2 – 3:30 EST.

Your attendance is vital. Big or small, everything we do helps prevent a young person from making a decision they may regret (and often do).

Please RSVP for this event:

RSVP link: https://tinyurl.com/demilitarize2026

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Education, Not Enlistment

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 14 January 2026 Hits: 91

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January 12, 2026 / Natasha Souza / NNOMY - The military was part of my life long before I was old enough to understand what war meant.

My father served in the Army. Growing up, deployment was not an abstract policy debate—it was our household reality. Iraq. Afghanistan. Each deployment brought a quiet fear that settled into everyday life. Each return carried relief, alongside the understanding that something had shifted. The military does not enlist only one person; it pulls entire families into its orbit. That reality is rarely acknowledged, and almost never disclosed to the young people later targeted for recruitment.

That lived experience is why military recruitment in schools raises serious ethical concerns.

Teenagers are approached at a developmental stage where they are still forming the capacity to understand long-term consequences. They are encouraged to sign legally binding contracts written in complex language, while being presented with a carefully curated narrative of service. Recruiters emphasize opportunity—education benefits, job training, structure—while minimizing or omitting the realities of lost autonomy, indefinite obligation, physical and psychological risk, and the inability to refuse orders once enlisted.

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Alarming Increase in Domestic Militarization

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 07 January 2026 Hits: 96

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January 2026 / Lauren Morales / Committee Opposed to Militarism & the Draft (COMD) - For decades the United States has been a hypermilitarized country. The public is force fed the notion that we must respect the armed forces who are forever fighting to keep U.S. Americans safe at home and abroad. Yet there has always been a small part of society that challenges this indoctrination, recognizing that worshiping imperialist ideology is irreconcilable to national and global justice.

But what happens when the empire’s Department of Defense becomes the Department of War, and the war is being waged on our own cities and on our own people? Will members of mainstream U.S. confront their blind glorification of militarism when they see soldiers in the streets facilitating inhuman immigration policies and enforcing the criminalization of dissent?

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ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 31 December 2025 Hits: 119

A strategy document shared among immigration officials details plans to use influencers and geo-targeted ads to supercharge their push to hire thousands of deportation officers nationwide.

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December 31 / Drew Harwell, Joyce Sohyun Lee / Washington Post - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are planning to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun-rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign, part of what the agency called a “wartime recruitment” strategy it said was critical to hiring thousands of new deportation officers nationwide, according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post.

The spending would help President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda dominate media networks and recruitment channels, including through ads targeting people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear, according to a 30-page document distributed among officials in this summer detailing ICE’s “surge hiring marketing strategy.”

The Department of Homeland Security has spoken publicly about its fast-tracked effort to significantly increase ICE’s workforce by hiring more than 10,000 new employees, a surge promoted on social media with calls for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.” The agency currently employs more than 20,000 people, according to ICE’s website.

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Leave the Military Now

Parent Category: NNOMY Articles 24 November 2025 Hits: 137

What does courage demand?

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Oct 01, 2025 / Hamilton Nolan / How Things Work - Six months ago, I wrote a piece urging soldiers to leave the United States military. At the time, the possibility that the president might use the military as a tool to unjustly abuse US citizens was still somewhat theoretical. At the risk of being repetitive, events in the world make me feel compelled to write, once again: Leave the military now. The time when you can say that you did not understand what might happen is coming to an end.

Yesterday, the Secretary of Defense and the Commander in Chief gave speeches to all of our nation’s generals, who they had ordered to assemble in Washington. It is bad enough, I imagine, for all of these accomplished career officers to be subjected to the performative tirade of Pete Hegseth, a childish television host, installed as their superior, ranting about the need to be more macho, fairly dripping with overcompensation for his various inadequacies. Yet if Hegseth’s speech was unnecessary, bigoted, and cartoonish, the performance of the Commander in Chief was much more substantively dangerous.

First, because it must have been clear to all of those assembled generals that Donald Trump, who possesses complete and total control of the military and its awesome powers, is, at best, mentally unwell. His speech, characteristically, was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness rant consisting mostly of narcissism and fiction and personal grievances. The mind of the man who has the ability to tell all of these officers what to do is broken and impervious to facts and reason. This is the man who can tell you when and how and who to kill.

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