Testimony from member of the Military Readiness and Merit Coalition, Brigadier General Christopher “Mookie” Walker, USAF ret, USAFA ’88. He had made plans to travel from West Virginia to attend the May 2024 DACODAI meeting in person in Arlington, VA until DACODAI canceled the public from attending in-person.
Transcript
Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Frank, for having us. Thank you, General Bishop.
I want to talk about three different things. My upbringing, how the Air Force transformed me, and what’s going on now.
My upbringing is similar to other panelists. My mother and father actually came to this country in the late fifties from Jamaica, and they established themselves. They became citizens eventually in the seventies, but doing it the right way.
My upbringing was one of excellence. If I were to come home with a 95 on a test, my father would go, why didn’t you get a 100? If my father said, have you finished your homework? I go, yes and I try to go to sleep. He would wake me up, and he said he checked my homework and it’s wrong. Come do it again.
That being said, I was raised with a spirit of excellence, and everybody’s going to know I’m the best, because it’s obvious.
My parents never talked to me about politics. Those sort of things were indoctrinated into me through just growing up in New York City at that time.
So growing up with New York City in the seventies, in my formidable years and early eighties, but when I went to the Air Force Academy, I got to see and hear from Americans from every corner of the nation and quite honestly, a corner of the earth.
Folks who had been growing up in Britain, Japan, and we also had exchange students.
I started really hearing things, and debating them in my head and saying, am I right or are they right? And a lot of things.
The Air Force transformed me to be even more merit-based because I didn’t want anyone thinking that any position I got was because it was a charity thing for the color of my skin.
Now, let’s talk about what’s going on now. So General Bishop did mention that my last assignment was in the Air Force Office of Diversity and Inclusion and, holy smokes.
My position in there was as an advisor, senior advisor, and as a one star. Anybody who knows the Pentagon, a one star is not going to be able to go in and kick over the desks and change things.
So my role in there was to try and be a speed bump for the crazy. And crazy came up quite often, but I also used that time to report back to General Bishop and others in STARRS. Here’s what’s going on. Prepare for this, the DoD—because I can’t say it’s just the Air Force—it’s the DoD, their version.
I’ll start this by saying diversity is not a bad thing. How you get there can be a bad thing.
The way they’re getting there is strictly Marxist and dividing all of our troops.
My way of doing it would be what I’d call the professional athlete model. Let’s do it like the NFL does it. Let’s do it like the NBA or the major league baseball does it.
They go to every corner of the nation, actually, they go to every corner of this earth to find the best talent. They start programs when kids are as young as ten years old. So by the time they reach age 2021, they are the best.
That’s what the DoD should be doing.
Matter of fact, there’s a doctor, Roland Fryer, who’s an economist, a black professor and economist at Harvard, and he tried suggesting that Harvard is doing it the wrong way.
What they should be doing is investing in feeder schools that help the children in communities where the schools are failing them because there are sharp, smart kids there.
It’s just as the schools are failing them, these feeder schools can actually feed up Harvard, and they wouldn’t have to lower standards because they would get the best.
They would get the best in the nation, naturally, just like the NFL, NBA does.
His suggestion was met between silence and vilification. And so there you have it. That tells me that what’s going on is a plan. It is all Marxism.
Okay, let’s go on to another one. While I was in the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Diversity and Inclusion, they were going to put together this program through Georgetown University called the leadership program in managing inclusion.
I was amongst the first of this senior people going into that so I could see what’s going on. There was a lot of what I’m just going to say, straight up propaganda.
It’s trying to say, oh, yes, black people cannot be racist. If you don’t ask people what their pronouns are, you’re wrong. And there were a lot of us bristling on this.
There are two general officers who are currently serving who, when they retire, they’ll tell you. We’ve had conversations saying, this seems like straight up indoctrination and propaganda. I said, yep, but the Air Force touted it as something that all the senior leaders should go through. And I said, holy smokes, where are we on this?
I’ll tell you about a time in a conference room full of general officers and senior executive service SES folks, where the theme of that meeting was, let’s figure out a way to make drag shows palatable to the American public.
I listened to everybody, and no one was pushing back. I had to say to myself, well, I guess I’ll have to retire a little earlier, but I’m going to say something.
I said, why would we do something like that? We don’t even do burlesque shows. We don’t do lingerie shows on our bases. Why would we cater to less than 1% of the population and alienate the rest of the 99%?
Then other people started, well, okay, yeah, you got a point, blah, blah, blah. But if I hadn’t said anything, you know what we’d be having right now? Drag shows on Air Force bases.
So I’ll say this. I lost confidence in the senior leadership of the Air Force, because even in my last week on active duty, I should have been on terminal leave. But I decided to go to the Department of the Air Force DEI conference and hear Secretary Kendall himself.
He was doing just fine, but at the end of his speech, he recommended everybody ready’s book on anti-racism. Less than a week later, Kendi was exposed as a fraud for bilking Boston University of millions of dollars with his fraud program.
Again I said, why are our leaders leaning forward into something that is so destructive?
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