STARRS Board of Advisors Brigadier General Chris “Mookie” Walker, USAF ret, USAFA ’88, was interviewed on PBS News Hour regarding DEI in the military.
Watch:
(For Transcript, see Retired military leaders weigh in on Trump ordering Pentagon to cut DEI programs (PBS News Hour)
STARRS President Col Ron Scott (USAF ret, USAFA ’73) noted that at the beginning of the program, the reporter said that DEI initiatives in the military began under the first Trump Administration then expanded under the Biden Administration.
As most know, it was actually under the Obama Administration when DEI began, also see in our DEI in the military timeline.
Here is a letter Col. Scott wrote to the producers: STARRS Letter to PBS News Hour 29JAN25 (pdf).
Click to enlarge below:
PBS News Hour Program Producers:
Thank you for addressing DEI in the Military during your January 28, 2025, PBS News Hour Program (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO1NivloRVk).
I want to bring to your attention that in teeing up the segment, at the 34:50 mark, you misrepresented the genesis of DEI in the military. It did NOT begin with President Biden’s predecessor.
While Marxist-based critical theory was making inroads as far back as the 1930s, thanks to Columbia University’s Frankfurt School, it was the Father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, who aggressively advanced critical theory in the 1960s, eventually manifested via critical race theory and its praxis of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
For the military in particular, DEI was more formally instantiated via the Military Leadership Diversity Commission (MLDC), chartered without debate by the Congressional Black Caucus in October 2008 in the Fiscal Year 2009 National Defense Authorization Act. Demonstrating that discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation was possible within the Department of Defense, President Obama established diversity and inclusion personnel and programs across the entire federal government in an August 18, 2011, Executive Order 13583. Most of these illegal and unconstitutional discriminatory developments blossomed under the public radar. On this page on our website, we have a timeline of DEI initiatives in DOD which illustrates this.
It was late in his Administration that President Trump issued a cease and desist Executive Order 13950, on September 22, 2020. As we know, President Biden rescinded that EO and issued several more reinstating DEI across the entire federal government.
We are available to be interviewed in a future episode.
Sincerely,
Ronald J. Scott, Jr., Ph.D.
Colonel, USAF, Retired
President and CEO
Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services, Inc. (STARRS)
[email protected]
Leave a Comment