Moral Injury, American Identity, and the Power of Consent

The text below is the speech I gave at the Duty to Disobey viewing held in Independence, OH on June 30, 2026. This text appears exactly the way I wrote it, but may deviate slightly from the way it was delivered. There were a few additional statements I inserted in the speech in the moment that are not reflected below. The speech originally had no title. I chose the title in order to post it here.

One of the themes central to this speech is moral injury. I was glad that moral injury was mentioned in the documentary by Dr. Crisanna Shackelford, who was the first individual that I heard adequately describe this phenomenon as it relates to the military’s covid shot mandate and other response measures.

If you missed the viewing of the documentary, you may still purchase DVDs at dutytodisobeyfilm.com.

Full text of speech below:

July 4th starts tonight!!

Good evening, everyone. Thanks so much for coming out tonight. It’s so good to see all of you. And a special thanks to Jen for hosting tonight.

If you would, please stand up if you are currently serving in the military. Please stand up if you are a military veteran. Please stand up if you are the spouse of a service member or veteran. Please stand up if you have evet met anyone in the military. If you have ever watched a military movie, please stand up. If you have ever heard of the U.S. military, please stand up. Okay, is everyone standing? If you are standing, tonight’s message is for you.

This message is about the military but it is not just for the military. It is for all Americans because it affects us all. And dare I say, it even impacts others around the world. Just yesterday I was interviewed by a gentleman from the UK, a former British Army officer himself, who was interested in my story as it relates to the issues discussed tonight. We even briefly discussed the documentary. Our message resonates with many people, even those who don’t necessarily live here because they have undergone similar circumstances in many cases.

One of the major reasons that it remains important for us to still talk about, and call attention to, the covid shot mandate is because its effects still persist. How so? Well, physically there are service members that likely died from the shots (How many? We may never know). Many service members are permanently injured from the shots. Service members lost their jobs, careers, their livelihood. Others remained in the service, but their careers were permanently altered. These are the harms that we know about, even if we don’t necessarily know the full extent. We can acknowledge the physical and financial effects. We can even acknowledge the psychological or mental impacts.

Let’s talk about the moral effects. What is moral injury?

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs tells us from their own website that when under “traumatic or unusually stressful circumstances, people may perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” This then leads to moral injury, which is the “distressing psychological, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of exposure to such events.”

Here’s what this means. It means that if you are directly or indirectly a part of acts that conflict with your moral code, it may cause a type of disjuncture, or disconnect. This can be especially acute if you are part of an organization or institution that has a well-established moral code, ethos, or set of principles that it purports to uphold. The profession of arms is such an institution. So imagine the disconnect that may occur when we witness the leaders of the institution act in open and defiant opposition to the very virtues and values that are said to be at the core of everything the institution represents.

That disconnect is moral injury. We can all recognize what it may feel like. It’s also important to know that it has a name: moral injury.

What does moral injury look like? I’m citing from something I wrote on my own Substack back in May of 2023. I said:

To truly see this, we must understand that there is a large portion of the currently serving military population, as well as many veterans who have recently departed from service, who are surely suffering moral injury in some capacity that falls within the definition provided above from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The website explains that these suffering individuals likely fall into the following groups:

1. Those who participated in some action that goes against their own moral code. These would be those individuals who were uncomfortable with the policies implemented by DoD but went along with them, perhaps to save their careers. This group could also include those who were initially “true believers” in the injection policies, but have since learned the reality of the objectives behind the mandates and now find it difficult to reconcile their own previous actions with what they now know.

2. Those who witnessed an action that violates their own personal moral code. These are the individuals that did not directly participate in the harmful actions that were part of the covid-19 response policies. They may have even openly opposed them and perhaps were even harmed in some way by the policies (such as loss of promotion, loss of desired duty assignments, or loss of one’s career entirely). This can be difficult for individuals to accept because they likely feel a strong sense of identity and professional kinship with an organization (the military) that has betrayed their trust and has instead turned against what it purportedly stands for (such as the Constitution).

3. Often individuals can fall into both of the above categories. One can participate in bad actions as part of a group or organization that also pushes the bad action. In this type of case, the participating individual perhaps feels that they were trapped and coerced into doing what they did. In turn, they feel both like a perpetrator and a victim.

How does this moral injury manifest itself?

Again, we will consult the Department of Veterans Affairs website for their entry on the topic of moral injury. First, for those who committed acts that violate their own moral code (Group #1 above), they will feel guilt. This guilt is act-oriented, which means that the person’s guilt is directly tied to whatever action is deemed to be in direct opposition to the person’s moral code. The feelings of guilt will manifest themselves as something like: “I committed a bad act and I feel guilty about the act.”

Specifically, there are leaders all across the military that feel guilty for pushing the covid shots on their subordinates when now it is abundantly clear that the shots were harmful. They may also feel guilty about marginalizing the individuals who resisted the injections. Whether or not these individuals have the courage to admit their guilt and do anything about it remains to be seen, but the guilt is undoubtedly there.

Another way in which moral injury affects those in Group #1 is through shame. The shame goes further than guilt. Rather than being about what one has done (the act), shame is about who one is (the actor). This shame is expressed in terms such as: “I am a bad person because of what I did.” It is immediately clear how destructive this type of shame could be. It can be prejudicial to one’s self-esteem, professional output, and relationships with others in both a personal and professional setting.

There are leaders across our Armed Forces who feel uncomfortable with themselves as a result of the policies they carried out. They are having a hard time looking themselves in the mirror. Some of them have a hard time wearing the uniform because they question whether or not they deserve to wear it. They are now unsure of their own character. They question whether or not they are the type of person who should be serving in the military or whether or not they should be serving in a leadership or command capacity. Again, perhaps they lack the courage to speak up but that does not mean that they are not internally conflicted.

It doesn’t end there. The entry on the Veterans Affairs page tells us that disgust is another potential effect of moral injury. Disgust primarily affects the moral injury victims in Group #2. This is a massive problem. This means that there are currently serving troops who feel disgusted with their leaders and with their organizations. They may actively resent both their local leaders at the unit level (these would be the leaders they interact with daily) and also the senior level leaders in the Pentagon that service members see as holding overall responsibility for the harmful policies.

Truthfully, we must admit that many individuals will feel more than one of these sentiments, particularly if they see themselves as both a perpetrator and victim of the harmful covid-19 injection policies.

Now let’s take this one step further. Let’s look at identity. Think about how important our identity is. Think about the importance of your name, your family’s name, or the name of any group you freely associate with. Think of the symbols connected to groups you are a part of. National symbols, faith symbols, etc. Think about how names and symbols are related to identity. Then think about how culture and values are associated with identity.

So how does moral injury potentially impact identity? America, as a nation, also is said to have begun according to a set of principles and ideals. In fact, much of that is infused into the ideals that have formed part of the military ethos. After all, we are a nation born of war. The principles of faith, truth, self-determinism, and protected rights lie at the heart of what it means to be American. We often contemplate this every year around this time. Hopefully July 4th means more to us than hot dogs and fireworks (not that those things are bad- they aren’t). So how do we explain how our own leaders, military or otherwise, seem to act in ways totally oppositional to what we have all been taught that our country is, does, and represents?

Increasingly, it seems that Americans don’t know what their country stands for. As we approach July 4th, particularly on the 250th anniversary of that date, we should know what our country stands for. And yet, many of our leaders do not know, or do not care what our country stands for. They stand in direct opposition to the truth and freedom that we as Americans want to believe that our country is the grand champion of.

What happens when there appears to be a gap between what we believe our nation to be and what we observe that it is? Ladies and gentlemen, I tell you that this disconnect is moral injury. Over time, we as a country have suffered deep moral injuries. When what we believe about ourselves is attacked, it is an affront to our identity because what we believe about ourselves is such an integral pillar of our identity. And our identity is a core component of our very personhood. An attack on our identity is an attack on our personhood. An attack on the collective identity of a group is an attack on each person in that group.

This attack on our ability to readily identify who or what we are is, in large part, caused by moral injury. And as much as we may look and say that others have perpetrated this great wrong against us—and that may certainly be true—we have also perpetrated it against ourselves. And when I say that, I do not imply that people here have committed some great injustice against this country that has then caused us to lose our identity.

But I do say that many of the injustices perpetrated against this country come from within. They come from individuals who, in our name, carry out the most sinister actions, often against its own citizens. How are these actions done in our name? First, they are done with our taxpayer dollars. Second, they are done through the nominal assent of our supposed representatives. In a republican form of government, we have a great responsibility on our shoulders. We are expected to act. We are the ultimate stakeholders. Under God, We the People are the subjects, not the objects, of American sovereignty.

We, as citizens, do bear some responsibility for what is happening in our country. Again, let me reiterate that I’m not laying great blame at the feet of anyone specifically in this room. Much of what has happened in this nation has happened in spite of our efforts to resist not because we have facilitated them.

However, in the collective, we all bear responsibility. So what do we do? How do we resist the evil, the lawlessness, the sheer insanity that has taken our nation?

Let me share some thoughts from a great leader of the 20th Century. Some of you may be familiar with him, and some of you may not. His name is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was a Soviet dissident. He spent nine years in the gulag and was exiled from the U.S.S.R. for his criticism. The day before his exile in February of 1974, he released an essay to a tired, beat down, Soviet population that had already endured more than a half century of horrendous totalitarianism. The essay was called “Live Not by Lies,” which is a powerful call to action that anyone can follow, regardless of position, status, or social influence. Solzhenitsyn says, and I will read a few excerpts,

“We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:

‘But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.’

We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. We have lost our strength, our pride, our passion.

We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise: we cannot escape the environment, the social conditions; they shape us, ‘being determines consciousness.’ What have we to do with this? We can do nothing.

But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that it is not so. It is not ‘they; who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we!

It will never come unstuck by itself…if we do not, at the least, recoil from its most vulnerable point.

From lies.

For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence…it demands of us only submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.

Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies!

And thus, overcoming our timidity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies…or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?

Solzhenitsyn, a man who knew far too well the face of tyranny, explains what we can do. He does not advocate violence here. He does not advocate armed resistance. His primary approach is to withdraw consent. We must not support the lies that prop up architecture of enslavement. In many ways, direct and indirect, we become the agents of our own destruction through our consent. If there is a July 4th lesson here, do not consent to the aims of those who are bent on destroying this nation.

Let’s not consent to those who would have us forget our identity as Americans.

Many of the most American of Americans were represented in this film tonight. Some of these heroes are even in this room. Let us learn from them. How do we resist? How do we recover the dwindling American identity? We start by refusing to submit to the narratives engineered through lies. We stand for truth no matter the cost. We do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, personal consequences be damned.

We cannot stop what is happening in this country from the couch. We must get engaged. We must get involved. We must be men and women of action. We must recognize the moral injury and seek to heal it by treating it through moral rectitude, through alignment with the very ideals we caused through abandonment. We must recover our identity as a country.

We must be true Americans. No more, no less.