By James Nault
USNA ’81, ret Navy Captain
Critical race theory and associated racist ideologies have “Established a Beachhead at the Military Service Academies.”
Additionally, we reported that DOD recently held a “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Summit” despite various challenges presently confronting the military, such as a spike in recent fentanyl overdose deaths. And, as we reported here, President Biden’s new “equity” Executive Order requires DOD to create an “Agency Equity Team.” Part of this team’s mission will be to “support continued equity training and equity leadership development for staff across all levels of the agency’s workforce.”
But now, in a press release, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) announces that he has introduced a bill—with Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), Steve Daines (R-Montana), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) co-sponsoring—called the “Combating Racist Training in the Military Act,” which would prohibit DOD from teaching racist CRT ideology “in any Department of Defense institution, including service academies.” Congressman Dan Bishop (R-North Carolina-08) has introduced companion legislation in the House.
A second bill, also introduced by Senator Cotton and co-sponsored by Senator Blackburn and Senator James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) called the “Stop CRT Act,” would “prevent federal funding from going to schools that teach Critical Race Theory.”
“Radical activism should have no place in our military’s training. American soldiers should learn how to kill our enemies, not anti-American ideology. This legislation will prevent Department of Defense bureaucrats from teaching woke ideology,” said Senator Cotton.
“Critical race theory (CRT) is a poisonous ideology that seeks to divide Americans based on their skin color, and it must be ripped out, root and branch, from our institutions. CRT should have no place in American life and certainly shouldn’t be promoted using American tax dollars. The Biden administration and radical Left’s relentless promotion of these racist, anti-American ideologies is toxic to our country and culture. These bills are one crucial part of our fight against the insidious effort from the Left to fundamentally transform society based on their designs,” said Congressman Bishop.
National Review notes that the two bills have “a deep bench of support in the Republican caucus” and explains that the Stop CRT Act “would prohibit federal funds from going to schools that teach students that one race is inherently inferior or superior to another, that someone is inherently oppressive or racist because of his or her racial identity, that America is a fundamentally racist country, or that promote critical race theory in general.”
NR also explains that “the Combating Racist Training in the Military Act would bar the military from including similar concepts ‘in trainings or other professional settings, if their inclusion would reasonably appear as an endorsement,’ and prohibit ‘hiring consultants to teach such theories, compelling individuals to profess belief in such theories, or segregating individuals on the basis of race in any setting,’ according to a previous press release” from Senator Cotton’s office.
National Review summarizes by noting that “over $4.3 billion in federal funding has been lavished on progressive causes — CRT and gender-studies education grants, DEI or ‘culturally responsive’ reeducation boot camps, LGBT advocacy groups, and so on — since 2016″ and that Senator Cotton’s two bills aim to “cut off CRT’s lifeline at the national level by ending its access to the gravy train of federal dollars,” although with “a Democratic Senate majority, to say nothing of an octogenarian president whose administration has a bottomless appetite for anti-American racialism, the odds of the aforementioned Republican bills passing this session are about as good as those of a blizzard slamming Death Valley”:
But with only a one-chamber Republican majority, conservative statecraft in the 118th Congress is going to have to mean something other than just passing laws. In a moment when the GOP appears to have very little idea of who it is and what it stands for, so-called messaging bills such as the pair introduced by Bishop and Cotton have a two-pronged disciplining and consensus-making function: First, they rally a disorganized and internally divided Republican Party around a specific set of priorities; and second, they forge the outlines of a new Republican agenda, legitimating the policy proposals with the popular support of the caucus.
They also set the tone. Legacy media have consistently sounded the alarm about the ‘chilling effect’ that state-level anti-CRT laws inflict on teachers. But that’s a feature, rather than a bug, of these efforts — a ‘chilling effect’ on the proliferation of CRT means that the bans are having their intended effect. Republicans at every level of government should be seeking to put the CRT regime on notice. Gone are the days when taxpayer-funded progressive activism can persist without meaningful resistance from the Right. One way or another, this country is headed for a reckoning over the corruption of its education system.
As a 31-year military veteran, all I can say is God Speed Senator Cotton, as CRT and related ideologies will eviscerate the unity that is the U.S. military’s cardinal virtue and strength. The sooner these poisonous ideologies are rooted out of the military, the better.
First published on Legal Insurrection
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