Tag: Wokeness

Revisiting The Racialist Nonsense Espoused By Biden’s Pick For Joint Chiefs Of Staff Chair

Shawn Fleetwood for  The Federalist.com

The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to hold a confirmation hearing in the coming weeks for Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, who was tapped by President Joe Biden last month to become the next chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

While legacy media’s coverage has largely focused on the “history-making” nature of Brown’s nomination, such coverage has ignored the Air Force general’s previously disclosed support for the same DEI ideology currently wreaking havoc on the U.S. military. For context, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives (often abbreviated to DEI) employ a divisive and poisonous ideology dismissive of merit to discriminate based on characteristics such as skin color and sexual orientation. Individuals who qualify for a certain position due to their merits but don’t meet the discriminating entity’s goal of being more “diverse” are passed over in favor of those who meet the preferred identitarian standards.

Following the May 2020 death of George Floyd, Brown issued a video statement expressing his thoughts on the situation and his personal experience as a black American in the Air Force. In the video, Brown questioned whether non-black airmen viewed racism as a problem, saying“I’m thinking about how these airmen view racism, whether they don’t see it as a problem since it doesn’t happen to them or whether they’re empathetic.” At the end of the video, Brown also expressed his desire to acquire “the wisdom and knowledge to lead, participate in, and listen to necessary conversations on racism, diversity, and inclusion.”

While participating in a virtual discussion hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs later that year, Brown indicated that“[a]t the higher level of the Air Force, diversity ha[d] moved to the forefront of personnel decisions such as promotions and hiring.” During the same event, Brown also admitted to using his post to increase opportunities for so-called “diverse candidates” in the Air Force, saying he “hire[d] for diversity” when building his staff.

Brown has also pushed back against sentiments from congressional Republicans who have expressed concerns about the Biden administration’s attempt to spread DEI instruction throughout the military, saying in a February 2022 interview, “[Y]ou’ve got to look at the demographics of our country, how it’s changing. If you have that approach [of opposing inclusivity efforts] you’re gonna have very few people that come serve.”

In addition to espousing racialist rhetoric, Brown has also seemingly taken several actions as Air Force chief of staff to expand so-called “diversity” and “inclusion” efforts throughout the branch. During a January 2021 interview with The Washington Post, Brown — in response to being asked about a PBS report alleging a lack of diversity among Air Force personnel — claimed the Air Force was taking several actions to address such purported issues. 

“We broke up our promotion boards to actually do developmental categories, so it wasn’t kind of about a big one-size-fits-all by and large, and that gives us a better little better chance to work some of the talent management aspects,” Brown said. “The other things that we have to do is ensure that we have diversity on the boards, but also diversity on the candidate list. And that’s something we have been doing, but I don’t know that we’ve been doing as purposeful as we probably could and as purposeful as we plan to do.”

Additional examples of Brown’s attempts to woke-ify the Air Force can found here.

The progressives are determined to use our military as social experiment. It started with Obama and continues (much more openly and actively) under the puppeteer’s administration. None of our enemies need to take any direct action to attack us. They need merely to sit back and laughingly watch the destruction of our military.

The Narcissism Of Woke Totalitarianism

“Anyone who thinks the terrifying trend of posthumous censure will end with Roald Dahl is dreaming”

Michael Shellenberger

The publisher of the late British children’s author, Roald Dahl, has changed hundreds of words and passages in his books to make them politically correct. “Language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender, and race has been cut and rewritten,” reported The Telegraph, whose journalists compared 10 of Dahl’s books from 2022 to their 2001 versions. “Remember the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach? They are now the Cloud-People. The Small Foxes in Fantastic Mr. Fox are now female. In Matilda, a mention of Rudyard Kipling has been cut, and Jane Austen added.”

The racially sensitive censors even removed the word “black” as a descriptor of inanimate objects. “In Fantastic Mr. Fox, a description of tractors, saying that ‘the machines were both black,’ has been cut. In the new Dahl world, it seems, neither machines nor animals can be described with a colour.”

The censorship by Puffin, which Penguin Publishing Group owns, drew a sharply critical response from journalists and authors. “Roald Dahl was no angel,” tweeted Salman Rushdie, “but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.” Seethed Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator, “If you weren’t worried about cancel culture before, surely this egregious assault on some of the best-known children’s books of the modern era, this posthumous purging of an author’s output, will change your mind.”

Many on Twitter posted a quote from George Orwell’s 1984, his famous novel about a future totalitarian dystopia. “Every record has been destroyed or falsified,” the novel’s main character says, “every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”

Totalitarianism is a strong word for the censorship of children’s books. The changing of “The old hag” to “the old crow,” “Chambermaid” to “cleaner,” and “You must be mad, woman!” to “You must be out of your mind!” in some kiddie books is hardly on par with the censorship of totalitarian regimes. And Dahl himself made his books less offensive, re-writing the Oompa-Loompa characters in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory so they were no longer African.

But Dahl would have been horrified by the hundreds of changes made by Puffin. “His relationships with his editors included marked fractiousness on Dahl’s part,” said his biographer. “He resisted interference.” Re-writing an author’s books without his consent, whether for legal reasons or because he is dead, violates the trust between authors and publishers everywhere. That such censorship is coming from within media, educational, and research institutions, in addition to governmental ones, doesn’t make it less dangerous, and may make it more so.

The Dahl censorship is occurring against the backdrop of an increasingly censorious Wokeism. Over the last few weeks, we have seen a witch huntagainst psychologist Jordan Peterson, an open letter from 1,000 writers, authors, and journalists demanding that The New York Times not report on problems with prescribing gender dysphoric children puberty blockers, and a State Department-funded “Disinformation Index,” which slanderedThe New York Post, Reason, and other reputable publications as fonts of disinformation, and urged corporations to redirect their advertising spending to publications including Huffington Post.

Two years ago, when activists were tearing down statutes of historical figures, people quoted from Orwell, above (“every statue and street and building has been renamed”). Since then, Woke activists have, with Dahl, started down the road of realizing another clause in that sentence: “every book has been rewritten.” Warns O’Neill, “Anyone who thinks the terrifying trend of posthumous censure will end with Dahl is dreaming.”

Totalitarianism is characterized by efforts to completely remake every aspect of society, including cultural life, and Wokeism today is re-writing texts, de-certifying disfavored individuals, cutting off funding, getting people fired, and pressuring social media platforms to deny access or secretly censor. Woke totalitarians are plainly seeking the total reorganization of society along the lines of a racist “hierarchy of oppression” that puts black and indigenous people above other “people of color,” (i.e., Latinos and Asians) as a single “BIPOC” ruling class. This is ostensibly to create the reverse of past hierarchies and is thus transparently vengeful and racist.

It is worth reminding ourselves that freedom of speech is not just “another issue;” it is the foundation of democracy. Without it, we can’t address any other problem, particularly sensitive ones concerning race and sex. And without it, we cannot truly live as free, dignified, and civilized humans.

We are not doomed to a dystopian 1984 future. But the 20th Century proves that we are not guaranteed a free and democratic one. What can be done to stop creeping Woke totalitarianism? To answer that question, we must first understand what’s driving it.

This should not be surprising. If they could find Dr. Seuss offensive, they will find all prior literature offensive. One wonders why they have not rewritten “Dick and Jane” books.

The Establishment Is Running Out of Cannon Fodder for Its Woke Military

By Kurt Schlichter for Townhall

Jump out of a perfectly good airplane, charge a machine gun nest, be stationed at Ft. Irwin – these are just three of the myriad miseries American patriots are willing to endure to defend our country. But today’s military is asking too much of our young people, as evidenced by the crashing recruitment rates that threaten to deplete a military already running short of soldiers. Have our young people suddenly turned from heroes to zeros, ne’er-do-well heirs of the brave warriors who confronted the forces of tyrannical gun control at Lexington and Concord? 

No. The kids are alright. The problems lie echelons above. 

Here’s a little leadership secret that’s actually not a secret at all to competent commissioned and non-commissioned officers. There are no bad cohorts of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and whatever the hell Space Force people are called. There are only bad leaders, and we have the worst military leadership in American history, starting right at the top with a commander-in-chief who is less like Ike than Beavis. 

In fact – and this rips me up to say because I would not trade my about 27 years in the Army for anything – the reluctance to enlist of the traditional, normal Americans who are most likely to serve and who are the most desirable for service, is entirely rational. You do have an obligation to serve your country in some way, the military being the highest and best way for those who are able. But you do not have an obligation to do so if your life is going to be squandered by a leadership whose strategies are a disaster, whose priorities are not the defense of this country but some sort of bizarre pan-global progressive ideology, and who will use you as a guinea pig in freakish and morally bankrupt social experiments, all while failing to fulfill even the most basic obligations of the leaders to the led. Our military today is failing to meet its recruiting goals because it has failed to earn the trust of normal Americans who would otherwise be inclined to raise their hands. 

As I discuss in my new non-fiction book from Regnery, “We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America,” our military was once great: 

“I was there at America’s pinnacle, present temporally and physically, right at the very peak of American power. But I did not know it then. In fact, it would not become clear to me until decades later. On February 24, 1991, I was a few miles west of Hafar al Batin in the Saudi Arabian desert along Tapline Road, at the main command post of the mighty VII Corps with my chemical decontamination platoon ….  When President Bush declared the ground war over on February 27, 1991, after about one hundred hours, I did not understand what it meant except in terms of my approximately 20-man unit. We knew we had won—the vaunted Republican Guard, with its Soviet gear, had been swept away by the unstoppable power of the VII Corps’s American tanks and the attached Brit armored division. Not just swept away—annihilated, defeated utterly and completely, so decisively that our potential opponents around the world watched in stunned horror as it dawned on them what America could do. It could do any damn thing it wanted. 

I was micro-focused on the platoon’s mission, so when the final victory was announced, I did not realize what was truly happening in the macro. I understood that I was an insignificant cog in a vast machine that had delivered our countrymen a remarkable triumph, but I would not fully appreciate the significance of the moment until 30 years later when, watching an unrecognizable U.S. military humiliated in the debacle at Kabul Airport, I saw America at its postwar nadir.” 

If we want enough quality recruits, we need to make our military great again.

I was present at the last great American military victory, and while I personally contributed nothing significant to it, I still highly recommend the experience over the grotesque betrayal of our warriors we saw when Biden abandoned Afghanistan. Thirteen dead, and for what? It was an operation that, to the extent that it was planned at all, was so poorly planned that it is hard to believe that no one was fired. But then, that’s not really so hard to believe at all. Accountability is for an E3 who leaves his M4 in the crapper, but promotions are for the bigwigs who had months of warning but still failed to ensure adequate infrastructure was in place at an airport so that a bomber could walk within 15 meters of our troops and blow himself and them up. 

On the tactical side – at the battalion level – our troops executed as well as could be expected in the horrible situation their senior leaders had led them into. But if you are a young American thinking of serving their country and you see that fiasco, are you going to rush out to sign on the line that is dotted? 

Our leadership is painfully frivolous regarding the most serious business of our government. What’s the bigger deal, China or the weather? The weather. Ridiculous. Hey, if our greatest strategic challenge is really climate change, maybe you might want to spend four years of your life enjoying yourself instead of sloshing through mud. Let them go enlist some Gaia worshippers from Santa Monica or Manhattan. 

Yeah, that’ll happen. The fact is, the kind of middle American patriots who make up our military are the very same people the ruling class our military serves calls “deplorables.” 

Oh, and who needs to earn GI Bill benefits when our Crusty-In-Chief and his party want to dump the tuition debts of students who fought the Battle of the Bong at Gumbo State on to suckers who paid their own way?

Serving our country is great – but the key component of that is the “our country” part. Right now, our country is being invaded over our Southern border, but if you were to enlist, you would not be going there to protect your home. It seems, from the giddy excitement of the bipartisan fusion party (H/T to Michael Walsh) about this new opportunity to spill other people’s kids’ blood, that you might get the chance to defend Ukraine’s borders. You will not be joined by anyone with a Ukrainian flag emoji in their Twitter bio, and you will go into battle knowing the discos of Kyiv are packed as we defend their country. 

These are not selling points to the kind of smart young people we need filling our ranks. 

Now, there is an off-chance that you might be engaged in a necessary war where American interests are truly at issue, but you will also realize that despite a nearly trillion dollar a year budget, our equipment is still aging and falling apart, and while there’s always money to celebrate Pride Month, there’s never enough training ammo. 

That social justice nonsense is another reason we can’t recruit. Would you want to waive your civil rights and sleep in the dirt to be part of an institution that hates you? Would you feel like joining an organization whose leadership is very, very focused on mythical “white privilege” and those scary “insurrectionists?” Remember, if you are conservative, you are an official extremist threat. If you are a believer, you run afoul of the official morality of CRT. If you think men can’t become women because they feel like it, you are a horrible bigot and you will be ordered to lie and use the pronoun du jour or else. 

Oh, and if you won’t submit to a vaccine that has not done much of what was promised, out you go with no pension. What a disastrous betrayal by our leadership. 

Maybe the people who think we ought to fight all their ridiculous wars should go do it themselves. Let’s see some nametapes with “Cheney,” or “Bush,” or “Obama” on them. Of course, credit is due to Biden – 50% of his sons served honorably and were not tossed out day one for drugs. Hey, if this was baseball, at .500 President Gumby would be the greatest batter of all time! 

Maybe the people who presume to lead our troops should stop trying to convert steely-eyed killers into neurotic Wellesley sophomores, complete with a long roster of microaggressions to focus on instead of training to win wars – something we have not done decisively in 30 years. 

And maybe our leaders need to stop tossing out fine troopers because of a flu shot. 

But they won’t do that as long as our president is this half-wit dust puppet. As “We’ll Be Back” points out, the key to revitalizing our military is electing a president who will confront the Pentagon with a whip and a chair. The joint chiefs? Fired. The heads of the military schools and war colleges? Fired. Everyone in a slot with a title that includes the word “diversity,” “inclusion,” or “equity?” Fired if a civilian, transferred to a real job if not. 

Until then, it’s sad that so many of the great potential warriors our country produces will take a hard pass on the military. But then, in the face of the total failure of the military’s leadership starting right at the top, it’s understandable if regrettable. We need a serious president who will spend serious political capital and, more importantly, serious time fixing what is broken. It can be done, but until it gets done, don’t expect enough of the kind of troops you would actually want to enlist to flock down to the recruiting offices. 

One of the several mistakes President Trump made was in appointing General MIliie as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. No, that is not a typographical error. Millie is so focused on wokeness and gender issues one wonders if he is having a gender identity issues.
Having said that, with Obama’s record of ridding the hierarchy of ”readiness” focused officers and elevating ’social justice’ focused officers, it is likely President Trump’s selections were severely limited.

This is such good news for us. Certainly there are still attacks; however, they are losing their power. They have so distorted language even the least educated can see it.

So Woke They Can’t See Straight

Outkick’s Bobby Burack: “At this point, the far Left may completely self-destruct because when ideology becomes a religion, its adherents never know when to stop.” 

“Though they looked mighty in stature, the woke Left never quite captured the support of the country. Most Americans never liked them. It only seemed that way because they had so successfully taken over our most influential institutions — the media, tech, Hollywood, sports, and academia — and thereby controlled public messaging. Today, we see that the rest of the country is finally fighting back.

“Radicalized institutions have become a net negative for progressives. The Left is losing influence over the consensus conversation because even moderates have begun to resent their abuse of power.

“Americans have notably revolted against the corporate press, the most effective source of messaging. Journalists and anchors can no longer turn Americans against one another because Americans, by and large, have turnedon them.

“This is the state of the cultural divide: character assassins who have set out to expose their enemies have ultimately exposed themselves.”

“So the advantage in the culture war is shifting quickly. Previously dispirited Americans now see how fragile these paper tigers have always been. 

“It’s unfortunate that it took years of online smear campaigns, the installment of CRT training programs across the country, and social media companies interfering with the 2020 presidential election for the pendulum to swing. The weak can only win when you willingly play by their rules, and we willingly played by their rules for far too long.”

“This entire campaign has always had an expiration date. Its existence was never to create a more equal society but to advance the social status of corporate and political leaders and to defeat the opposition. Wokeism has never bettered anyone. In fact, it has fractured families, communities, companies, and institutions across this country. Some of which will not recover.

“But neither will the woke Left. Their stranglehold on public messaging has weakened. It is now a losing strategy.”