For as long as I can remember, United Services Automobile Association has been operating in my life, in the peripheries during my early pre-Vietnam days in the Army when NCO’s grumped about the low cost insurance and financial services being offered exclusively to officers, until our time, decades later, in and out of San Antonio, the institution’s home. In those years we had multiple accounts, banking and investing, with the behemoth it had become. In our two decades around and about San Antonio, we had many friends who worked for the growing financial services company who had nothing but praise for the family-friendly corporate culture. In the years I worked in community relations for a United Way agency in San Antonio, I was frequently on the huge corporate campus of USAA as they were a major source of funding and support for non-profit, community support agencies. During that period USAA opened their doors to enlisted military personnel, earning further admiration from this old soldier.
Last week USAA corporate leaders deliberately and decisively drove that great company off the long road of patriotic service it had so long followed and went headlong into the murky ditch of political correctness. by pulling its advertising from the Sean Hannity Show. Worse, they quite deliberately did this at an opportunistic time, when the conservative FOX Network, a respected alternate source of America’s news for the active, retired and veterans’ military communities USAA serves, is being besieged by liberal forces seeking to silence its conservative voice. FOX is, and has been since its inception, a popular favorite with the troops and their families, a voice which reverberates throughout and resonates within the lives of millions of patriotic Americans who wear or once wore the uniform, the overwhelming majority of whom rejected their use as the petri dish of social experimentation imposed on them by their Democrat recent commander in chief and the media monopoly that overwhelmingly supported his liberal aims. What’s more, as The Daily Caller points out, USAA’s excuse that it dropped Hannity because it does not support “opinion” shows is pure hogwash
Leadership at USAA, if you can call it that, seems to have conveniently forgotten that the “S” in their name stands for services, and not services in the sense of providing financial products and securities, but Services in the sense of Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard. Those entrepreneurial officers who founded the company back in 1922 with the express mission of serving the military officers’ community would be horrified by this craven collapse of its long-standing devotion to military culture and cowardly capitulation to the pernicious threat of political correctness. The military community should bury our White House in letters of objection to this move reminding our president that Sean Hannity was likely his single greatest media supporter during the recent campaign and still is. And, yes, Tweets to the Commander in Chief are fine, to encourage him to reach out to USAA to advise them that as the troops are unhappy with USAA’s caving in to liberal craziness and overreach, he as their commander, is by necessity, unhappy as well and suggests a wiser course of action is called for. SecDef Mattis should be copied on absolutely every such communication with the Commander-in-Chief. He might wish to save them for his bedtime reading.
Perhaps a soundly-sleeping General Mattis could keep a few of those left-leaning USAA execs awake at night…
Added: It seems that USAA has reinstated their advertising policy with the Hannity show, according to USAToday.
The San Antonio, Texas-based company said Tuesday it will also start advertising again on other programs where it had suspended ads, including “Hardball” and “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, and Jake Tapper’s “The Lead” on CNN.
