Testimony from member of the Military Readiness and Merit Coalition, Lt. General Rod Bishop, USAF ret, USAFA ’74. He had made plans to travel from Colorado to attend the May 2024 DACODAI meeting in person in Arlington, VA until DACODAI canceled the public from attending in-person.
Transcript
Well, thank you, Frank. Like Tommy Waller just said, my heart’s breaking, too. You know, 34 years wearing the cloth of our nation, never in my wildest imagination did I ever think that our United States military would be going down the road, that it’s going down again.
I think everybody’s hit some really important points, and, yeah, it’s happening as Tommy just said. He squarely lays the blame on the senior political ideologues who are forcing this down the throats of everyone in the military.
But there has to be some accountability, too. I believe that the senior military leadership who, as someone has said before me, just do not have that moral courage to say no.
Below them, though, and I think within the American public as a whole, I believe that some people just don’t understand this yet.
That’s why the court of public opinion and education from STARRS is the core of our mission.
The way I’d like to address that is we need to stop talking past one another. I think it begins with something that the President of STARRS taught me at least five years ago, because I haven’t played much golf in the last five years.
On the golf course, he told me something called about a Aesopian language and how the Left likes to control the language.
My war college instructor said that Lenin said, let me control the dictionary and I will control the world. I can’t find that reference, but I can find Saul Alinsky’s quote that says, control the language and you’ll control the masses.
It’s such a leftist tactic. and it’s so insidious. It comes across in nice sounding words.
So just for a couple of quick examples, I mean, “abortion.” We don’t call it abortion. We don’t call it killing a fetus, or I guess even, a baby that could survive on its own. We call it “woman’s reproductive healthcare”.
“Global warming”, that was getting a bad rap. “Climate change,” well, the climate’s been changing since the beginning of history. Who can refute that?
Not chemical castration or genital mutilation. Those sound bad. We’ll call it “gender affirming care”.
If it’s not pleasing to the ear, or if it’s not working, they change the language.
Look, two years ago, “critical race theory,” that’s what you heard all over the place. You didn’t hear much about DEI.
People began to realize that CRT really did come from Marxism, and so they changed the words to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Now, who can argue with that? Those are nice sounding words. And then just a little change we see creeping in.
Now, people were beginning to understand that equity–nice sounding word. But it really means the government or the organization cooking the books to ensure equal outcomes.
I think folks realize maybe we don’t really want that.
So, DEI, diversity, inclusion, nice sounding words. Here I’m going to go to a podcast from Barry Weiss. Here’s a glimmer of hope, because if a former New York Times editor, Barry Weiss, self prescribed liberal progressive can get it, maybe there’s hope for the rest of America.
She says,
Yeah, those words sure sound nice. In theory, they represent noble causes. They use the words, however, as camouflage. They are nothing more than a metaphor for a powerful, and I will add, poisonous ideological movement that is bent on recategorizing every single American, not for their individual worth, but just lumped into an identity group that’s judged on what that group is all about. And it pits us against one another in a kind of a zero sum game.–“DEI Must Die” on YouTube
One cadet put it very simply, “it’s nothing more than identity politics on steroids.”
So if we can agree that, there’s probably not much there to argue, can we agree just simply on three additional points?
As so many of the presenters before have said, this is Marxism that’s coming in our front door. If this did not originate from the Frankfurt School, which, by the way, is another example of changing names, used to be called before the Frankfurt School, the Marxist School, that came to the United States during Nazi Germany’s rise, set up shop in Colombia—Columbia, hotbed of radical leftist wings, as we see today.
If it didn’t come from the writings of Marcuse and Marcuse’s third wife and Derek Bell, where did it come from then? It’s definitely Marxist based.
Number two, can we agree that it has an intent to divide?
Just read the readings, read what they have written, and you’ll know it has an intent to divide.
Number three, it’s working. Look at all the examples we’ve already heard, and I’ll just tell one. Go to our website, we have 150 pages of evidence.
One cadet who I know goes into his first day of econ class in January. The instructor, who’s educated at Ivy League school, PhD and masters from there, going around the room, learning the names of cadets. “Cadet so and so…”. She comes to this cadet I know, son of a friend. She goes, hmm. I’m going to call you “White Boy Two” because that white boy in the back row, he’s taller. I’m going to call him “White Boy One” because all you white boys look alike.
Now, how in the world, in an organization or a profession that should thrive on cohesiveness and unity, how can anyone see that as being helpful?
So if we can agree on all of those things, we have to listen to the people, and the people will tell us that what is happening is discriminatory, it’s divisive, it’s demoralizing. The minorities tell us it’s demeaning.
Add all those things together, and it cannot help but create resentment.
So if we can establish this common ground, why would we, as a nation who has sacrificed 95,000 lives in Korea and Vietnam alone, fighting against this ideology, who has spent trillions of our American treasure fighting against this ideology in the Cold War, why are we just letting it in the front door?
And so, Frank, I’ll stop there. When we go to the questions, maybe we can suggest some solutions. But I think a very good solution begins with let’s get to ground truth. Let’s, as Scott just said, get to the facts on the ground, and then hopefully, we can sway some minds, get our country turned away from all of this nonsense.
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