STARRS President Ron Scott was interviewed on the Lee Elci – The Voice of Freedom radio show, 94.9 talk radio in Connecticut. Listen or read the transcript.
Transcript
Lee Elci
All right, ladies and gentlemen, very special guest joining us here. I’ve been excited to get a chance to talk to him. He’s all the way out there in Colorado calling us here today. And that’s Colonel Ronald Scott, who is, again, an Air Force retired colonel. Let’s just welcome him to the show. Colonel, good morning. How are you?
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Great. Lee, thanks for having me.
Lee Elci
Well, I appreciate you coming on. This has been a long time in the making, and we’re glad you were able to carve out some time for us. You’re representing… Let’s start with the website, then get into some of the particulars about what you want to talk about. What website is behind you?
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Well, it’s STARRS with two R, stars. Us. And STARRS stands for Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services.
Lee Elci
And it’s rampant in the services right now, isn’t it?
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
It’s terrible. Completely. Yeah.
Lee Elci
Well, okay. So give me a little bit of background. Let’s go first with a little bit of background on you, and then we’ll get into what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. How long did you serve? Give everybody a a quick bio of the colonel, Ronald Scott, here this morning, so everybody knows who’s talking to him?
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Well, I’m a mongrel. I served 34 years in uniform, four years at the Air Force Academy, and then 30 years on active duty. Trained as a pilot, from fighters and airlift aircraft. I ran the Air Force Operations Center at the Pentagon. Because of that, I have lifetime travel restrictions. You can imagine the sources and information I had access to. Then I got a PhD in political philosophy and recruited into a think tank called Applied Research Associates to work nuclear counterterrorism. Then I served as a professor at a university.
Then one day, 7 July, 2020, a friend of mine alerted me to a three-minute video that had been put out by football coaches at the Air Force Academy. It was very disturbing. It was after the George Floyd incident, so I can appreciate the sympathy that prompted the video. But these coaches chanted in a militant tone, Black Lives Matter, seven times, and gave five examples of racial injustice, Jim Crow laws, which no longer exist. The video is what prompted us to realize something is a battle here. Once we started taking a closer look, we realized that there was a terrible and dangerous ideology that was infiltrating our institutions to include our military and our service academies.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
That’s a long story short from how I got to where I’m at right now.
Lee Elci
Is this infiltration something new? Is that coming through with the Biden administration? Did it start during Obama? I know it didn’t happen during Trump. When did we start to flip that switch and become a woke group when it comes to the military?
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Well, for your listeners, there’s an excellent book, probably the best book on the topic, written by Christopher Ruffo, and the title is “America’s Cultural Revolution”. The synopsis here, it really started mostly in the 1960s, But the patron saint of the movement, he’s labeled the Father of the New Left, a gentleman named Herbert Marcuse, who was a member of the Frankfurt School that came to America during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, the Frankfurt School consisted of Marxists, but they were communists Marxists. When they sought refuge in the United States at Columbia University in the 1930s, they realized that the Marxist model wouldn’t work in America because of our large middle class.
The class warfare had to shift from an economic model to a political one. This is when they started identifying political identity groups. Blacks, Hispan, Asians, LGBTQ, feminists, you name it. You see how it has fully blossomed today as we watch the news and we see these groups that are claiming victim status and that thing. That was their entry into the American political system. Initially, it was somewhat violent with the Black Panthers, the weather underground, and they realized that that was not going to generate the revolution that they sought.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
That’s when Herbert Marcuse says, we need to be more subtle and insidious as we infiltrate the institutions. Now we have a lot of former members of the Students for a Democrat Society that serve in key positions in our government and universities. It’s an excellent book. Ruffo does a tremendous job of providing evidence to support the evolution of this movement in the United States as we know it today.
Lee Elci
A lot of this is born, I think, through the education system, obviously. Professors in these left-leaning institutions collegially in high school as well, indoctrinate the kids. But I would never think it would actually reach the military. Education is scary enough. But when it gets to you guys in the military, then I actually my ears perk up, and I think people need to really pay attention because a woke, left-leaning, agenda military is feckless in a lot of cases. It can’t fight like it once could. I would be very nervous about that.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Rightfully so. But Lee, when you mentioned the universities, there’s another book that recently came out in 2023 written by Drexel University Professor Stanley Ridgeley. Now, Stan was formerly a military intelligence officer in the military. Here’s an individual who’s trained to be very observant about developments. He published a book with the title “Brutal Minds”, and the subtitle, “The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities”. Another book heavily cited with evidence. I’ll tell you, people that read this book, they are shocked at the depth and breadth of this infiltration at our universities.
You can imagine for the military, the folks that come into the military come in from universities if they’re officers or our K through 12 system for our enlisted folks. Even the K through 12 system has been so heavily infiltrated. For example, the 1619 Project. It was rampant across our nation. We have a lot of these young men and women, boys and girls that are being indoctrinated into this ideology, which is Marxist or Neomarxist, cultural Marxist. It’s designed to cause division and resentment, oppressors and oppressed. And so these notions get anchored in the minds of these young boys and girls.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
And so you tell them facts of the contrary, and they reject it because they’re so emotionally grounded in it that they just refuse to accept facts of the contrary.
Lee Eli
But that being said, in the military, you always think, at least me, I always think that the military is able to break whatever bad habits somebody may have. Otherwise, they’re spit out. They’re chewed up and spit out, and they go on to do something else. The military is at least the United States military, I’ve always thought of as this elite machine of just well-rounded men and now women that are able to fight for the cause of the United States. But if you’re telling me now that leadership in the military has switched, like I said previously, I’m concerned about that. So how do you stop that?
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Well, we’re trying to get the truth out and to reach people where we can. I forwarded to you an email that I had released on March 25, and that was addressed to eight of my classmates from the United States Air Force Academy, class of 1973. Now, two of those eight are four-star generals, two or three stars. Three are two stars, and a one star in that group. We’ve got more general officers in our class than that. But these are individuals I knew personally. As you can see, I reached out to them, sharing with them that recently, one of our volunteers who discovered stars, and this gentleman is a retired Navy captain, class of 1963 from the United States Naval Academy. He was shocked when he discovered. He had no idea the depth and breadth of this infiltration until he visited our website, STARRS.us. And so he was sharing his observations with his boat buddies, he refers to them with that euphemism. And he’s gotten a variety of responses. Some of them were angry, some just completely dismissed him. But Lee, I’ll tell you how insidious and dangerous this was. I’d been at work on this for three years when Elaine Donnelly, who was President for the Center for Military Readiness, just casually mentioned the Military Leadership Diversity Commission in a call.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
It caught my attention. What was the MLDC, Military Leadership Diversity Commission? This commission was chartered by four Black congressmen without any debate in the fiscal year 2009 National Defense Authorization Act. This commission was chartered with figuring out how they were going to deploy diversity and inclusion within the military. Now, you can imagine the military, these are people who slew smartly and and follow orders. And so what they were doing wasn’t patently illegal or unethical, but they were using a different language to suggest that we have systemic racism in America. Well, no, we have pockets of racism, no doubt, but it’s not systemic. It’s not codified in our laws no longer. I mean, Jim Crow laws went out in the 1960s. But in their final report that was published in March of 2011, they talked about how important it was that we could not treat people equally because of their backgrounds. And so that’s when they justified using race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation as reasons to give preference to individuals. They even went so far to say that assimilation was dangerous in this effort. Wow. Because assimilation subordinated subcultural differences. You got to be kidding, you got to be kidding me.
Lee Elci
He’s right.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
You got to be kidding me. And they were blatant about it. And so Lee, this stuff is in the public domain, but people just aren’t aware of it. They’ve been operating under the radar. So that was March of 2011. Five months later, August of 2011, the President, i.e. Barack Obama, issued an executive order that established diversity and inclusion staff and programs across the entire federal government. So they used the Defense Department as a petri dish to demonstrate they could do it and get away with it. And now we have it across the entire federal government, and it’s vertical. It’s in states, counties, municipalities. It’s in universities. It’s in all the institutions in America right now. That was in 2011, August. And as you recall, in September of 2020, President Trump issued an executive order to cease and desist all of this stuff.
Lee Elci
That’s correct.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Cease and desist. Well, two months later, a new president, four months later, repealed all these executive orders and doubled down with three more executive orders, just amplifying and extending this diversity and inclusion business in the federal government. We’re talking- The last thing we’ll say on that is the day the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, established the Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion was the day that the Department of Defense Inspector General issued a report on the MLDC recommendations. There were 20 of them. And the I. G. Said that the Defense Department only implemented six of the 20. Therefore, more work needs to be done the same day Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, established the Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, with the intent to deploy the remaining 14 recommendations. This is what we’re up against today as we speak.
Lee Elci
Again, this morning we’re chatting with Colonel Ronald J. Scott, and the website is STARRS.us. You can take a look at this website and navigate it yourself. You mentioned things, and as I keep going back to the military being at the crux of this and being so dangerous. The idea of equity in the military, and you know this, but I’ll just tell all our listeners, it’s incredibly dangerous. Equity of outcome. Equality of outcome is very different.
You can’t have people who are being put in positions that are not capable of doing those jobs just because you need to satisfy some mandate of equity. It’s incredibly dangerous. They’re thinking about doing it in airlines now, of all places, to get people who are a certain color or a certain sexual persuasion in the cockpits of planes. I don’t want somebody flying me around the country who got a lower grade on an aircraft test and somebody who might be of a different ethnic background, but because you have to qualify and quantify certain groups of people, you’re putting people in jeopardy. You amplify that like a thousand times when you’re talking about the military.
Lee Elci
Am I right or am I wrong about that?
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
No, you’re right. Absolutely. But you know, Lee, the sad thing is, stars has filed 43 Freedom of Information Act requests since we started the lesson four years ago. 43 of them. Thirty-six alone at the US Air Force Academy. We’ve got some at West Point, some at Annapolis, and one at the SETCF level. Only about 10 of them have been answered. And by law, the agency is required to provide a response with records within 10 business days unless it’s complex, and they give them 20 business days. It took a judicial watch lawsuit on our behalf to get the Air Force Academy to release a document that I had requested in October of 2020.
This stems from a claim by Lieutenant General Jay Silveria. I don’t mind mentioning his name. He’s in the public domain. He was the superintendent at the time. The day after I saw that football coach video, he announced to the academy family that there was systemic racism in America and that the Air Force Academy was not immune. So he directed an assessment of the extent of systemic racism at the academy due to him in September 2020. So October, I requested a copy of the report.
It took a lawsuit over two years later to get a federal judge to compel the academy to release that report. And when they did, It was 167 pages. Every single page was marked for official use only, inappropriately. And they did that to shield it from the public. So FOUO was struck out on every page. 52 entire pages were fully redacted, 52, and then some of the remaining pages were redacted. So what did we discover in the unredacted pages? First, there was no evidence of racism, let alone systemic racism.
In one of the appendices established by a Way of Life Committee, which is an all-Black affinity group, talked about the importance of training the air officers commanding and the two enlisted folks in each of the units, 40 squadrons, four groups, one wing, that they are to be trained on identifying racism so that they can promote anti-racism. If they disagree with that whole approach, they don’t belong at the academy. They have language like that in this Report.
Okay, so the big takeaway here is during the two years that they stonewalled this report from the general public, they identified and trained 90 cadets to be diversity and inclusion officers and MCOs throughout all the units, two per unit, wearing purple arm ropes on their left shoulder, 24/7, the equivalent of political commissars throughout the cadet with a separate reporting chain to the Chief Diversity Office. That should be very disturbing. Why are they doing this stuff under the cover of darkness? Why are they shielding it from the general public?
Lee Elci
Well, because it’s insidious. They are trying to break apart this amazing institution of the United States of America. I’m convinced of that now. I mean, at every single level, it’s basically treason. In my mind.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Absolutely. But you know what we’ve discovered, we meet a lot of people, good Americans, who they’ve worked hard, they’ve paid their dues, and now They’re enjoying the fruits of their labor. They see some of this stuff happening, and it doesn’t affect them directly. So they just ignore it. I don’t have any ill feelings towards individuals like that. Well, they’re still good Americans. But there are many of us, and the numbers are growing, that see what’s happening to our nation, the nation that we serve in uniform in combat zones, to protect against threats to America. And the biggest threat during our lifetime was Marxism, the Soviet Union, and communism.
Today, China, a Communist nation, is a threat, an external threat to America. North Korea And then when you get countries like Iran and other militant countries, now we start to see what’s called the Red-Green Axel. And there’s been some recent reports out on the alliance, the unholy alliance between the Red, the Marxist, and the green, the militant Islamists. A good friend of ours, Zudi Jasser, who is a Muslim, Muslim, the cardiologist in Arizona, is a champion in this effort, realizing that, fellow Muslims who ignore what’s happening, do so at their own peril, that they’re There’s a need for a reformation among the Islamic crowd to realize that you can be a good American citizen in a constitutional Republic and still be loyal to your faith.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
So these are so many dynamics that are playing out, Lee, that we’re trying to make more people aware of it so that they can speak out when it’s appropriate or vote in a way that is needed.
Lee Elci
Well, Colonel, I can’t thank you enough. I’m out of time. I would love to keep you as a resource and talk to you down the road for sure. If there’s anything you ever need to get out as far as to the public and knowledge that you want to get out, you can absolutely use us here on the radio. We’d be honored to do that. One more time. Tell everybody where to go if they want to find out more information about you and about the group.
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Our website is STARRS.us. We have a tremendous amount of resources on that website. News articles, open letters that we’ve written, and resources for citizens. We actually give you tools that you can use to stem this ideological threat and hopefully conquer it.
Lee Elci
All right, my friend. Listen, it was great to get a chance to talk to you today. I appreciate it, and we’ll talk soon, okay?
Col. Ron Scott, STARRS President
Great. Thanks, Lee.
Lee Elci
Have a great day. I appreciate it very much. Again, the colonel joining us, Ron Scott here on the radio, and a lot of information. Go to that website. It does have a lot of great stuff for you, so take a look at that. We’ll come right back, everybody. Hang on.
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