you know military types have to do something after they get out of the service to make money?
theres absolutely a culture of worshipping servicemembers in the us and all the calculated aggression that some of our trained killers learned (or were selected for) in the service is used to grift this demographic. the entire guntube community of sf dudebros and the siegementality-fueled prepper subculture are other examples of what is really just another consumer fashion industry. there is absolutely nothing preventing veterans from exploiting the credibility gained by their station to sell you things that you might otherwise be skeptical about. i noticed a brand of gun lube that emphasized its ownership by ex-navy seals. sounds like a winning endorsement right? i looked it up later and it's really just roller coaster grease. of course, they're free to repack and resell as they please, because it is our own responsibility to look out for ourselves. but we have to be cognizant that it is possible for our confidence to be abused in the first place, and there are a lot of people who are all too trusting.
with that said, note the nature of the video thumbnail. there's a clear, psychology-informed format in designing youtube thumbnails that is proven to generate clicks -- an expressive face, arrows defining the topical focus. this is the same meta used to success by all the youtube content mills, like mrbeast. it's a clear telltale that anyone using this format is engineering their product with click generation as a primary objective.
