In an act that sparked a fiery online backlash, the Naval Special Warfare Command and the US Navy Seals celebrated the beginning of Pride Month on their official Facebook pages. Critics accused the elite unit of straying from their mission focus and succumbing to woke ideology. Among the responses, one person commented, “This woke s*** is like a cancer and needs to be handled and dealt with as a threat to national security.”
The backlash intensified further as the Pride Month acknowledgment appeared shortly after a post commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day, when 2,500 Americans died in the landings. This timing triggered additional sharp criticism from social media users expressing their disappointment.
Compounding these controversies, the Department of Defense committed an embarrassing error with a Facebook post that seemingly mixed up Pride Month with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Awareness Month. The Defense Department had named June as PTSD Awareness Month in June 2014, a year prior to declaring June as Pride Month. Although later removed and replaced with a PTSD Awareness Month graphic, the post elicited a wave of predominantly negative reactions yet also a few positive and amused ones.
Critics, including the Libs of TikTok page with its three million followers, lamented the transformation of the Navy Seals into a “woke force”.