On News Radio 790 WAEB, STARRS President Ron Scott was interviewed by News Director Dan Holtzman. They talked about Ron’s background, how STARRS was formed, the beginning of the Marxist ideological infiltration into the military, what STARRS is doing to counter this, and finally, his thoughts on Memorial Day.
Ron’s segment begins at 11 min 36 minutes, but prior to that, military veteran Paul Fisk is interviewed.
Listen:
TRANSCRIPT
Dan Holtzman
You heard Paul kind of give an intro as to who our guest is. He’s Dr. Ron Scott, PhD, retired Air Force colonel and president and CEO of STARRS, Incorporated. We’re going to talk to Ron about what STARRS is all about in the second half of the program and certainly his military history as well. We welcome him in. Ron, how are you? Thanks for doing this. Hope the Memorial Day weekend is treating you well.
Ron Scott
You great, Dan. I’m honored and privileged to be part of the program.
Dan Holtzman
We really do appreciate it. Give your biography, your history with the military, your background, and what led you to joining up the organization known as STARRS.
Ron Scott
Sure. You bet. Dan. I was really blessed to serve for 34 years in uniform in the Air Force. Probably the highlights being a combat pilot, flew in the Persian Gulf, commanded units, ran the Air Force Operations Center at the Pentagon, which really prepared me to be vigilant about things that you wouldn’t ordinarily be aware of.
Following that, I worked as a principal scientist with a think tank, a technical think tank, working counterterrorism. So I had a chance to meet some very great Americans that were doing what they could to keep America safe.
Then on 7 July 2020, a friend alerted me to a video that Air Force Academy football coaches had published, and it was on the front page of the Colorado Springs Gazette, a simple three minute video where several coaches chanted seven times Black Lives Matter and then they mentioned five examples of racial injustice. It really disturbed me because they mentioned Jim Crow laws, which went away in the 1960s, and the other concepts that they mentioned just really seemed bizarre.
So I did a little research, and my research indicated that those five claims were not true. And what disturbed me about it is that these were football coaches at the United States Air Force Academy that trains young men and women to be officers in the United States Air Force.
But at the very root of their learning, their training, is the importance of an honor code. And that video just struck me as being very dishonorable. And so that’s what really led to the creation of STARRS.
Dan Holtzman
You can find out more by the way at STARRS.US. The mission statement says it is “A group of retired military members and patriots who educate our fellow Americans on the dangers of the racist and radical DEI and CRT Marxist ideology infiltrating our military. We work toward eliminating these divisive influences to maintain a unified, cohesive fighting force, one based on merit and ability, not appearances or labels”.
That sounds like a full time job. Ron, how are you accomplishing that? Are you achieving your mission?
Ron Scott
Well, Dan, we enjoyed some great successes so far, and I have to tell you, we’re all doing this pro bono.
Dan Holtzman
No one’s getting rich on this.
Ron Scott
No, we’re not. And it’s full time. Our Chairman of the Board, Lieutenant General Rod Bishop, has been a real champion and has brought a lot of gravitas to our mission. Our Vice Chair is retired Major General Joe Arbuckle. He spent a lot of time working strategic issues for the Army Chief of Staff, so he’s a strategic thinker.
We’ve just really attracted some very talented officers and NCOs that see what’s happening and want to do what they can to preserve, fundamentally our Constitutional Republic. If our Department of Defense has been infiltrated by this dangerous ideology, it really puts our entire nation at risk.
I have to tell you, Dan, one of my favorite quotes that really drives this point home is from an Anglican dean, William Ralph Inga, who is a deacon, very prominent member of the Anglican Church in England, wrote a book in 2003 with the title Christian Ethics and Modern Problems. This originally came out in 1930, and here’s a quote from that book:
“History seems to show that the powers of evil have won their greatest triumphs by capturing the organizations which were formed to defeat them. And that when the devil has thus changed the contents of the bottles, he never alters the labels. The fort may have been captured by the enemy, but it still flies the flag of the defenders.”
Dan Holtzman
Wow.
Ron Scott
What we’re dealing with right now in particular is this philosophy, really more accurately an ideology called Critical Race theory. Its lineage goes back to the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, which took up home at Columbia University.
They were Marxists, but they masqueraded the Marxist teaching with the label Critical Thinking or Critical Theory. Critical Theory then became Critical Legal Theory, which penetrated our law schools across the nation. Today it’s in the form of Critical Race Theory.
So that becomes the justification for installing individuals to advance and enforce this theory of oppressors versus the oppressed in the form of diversity, equity, and inclusion officers.
This began in the fall of 2008 when the Military Leadership Diversity Commission was chartered in the fiscal year 2009 National Defense Authorization Act. This is really where it started to become institutionalized.
First in the military, less than a month after Barack Obama was inaugurated his first time. Less than a month, the Department of Defense came out in February of 2009 with its first publication with the language Diversity Management in the title.
Less than three years later, President Obama issued in August of 2011 an executive order installing diversity and inclusion officers across the entire federal government.
Now, in 2023, we see diversity/inclusion in the corporate world, academia, state and local governments. It really had its genesis in the fall of 2008. And today, this is what we’re dealing with.
The last thing I’ll say in that regard is right now at the United States Air Force Academy, there are 90 cadets, two per squadron. There’s 40 squadrons, two per group, four groups, and two at the wing level. 90 cadets wearing a purple arm cord, which signifies to the other cadets, that they are the diversity and inclusion staff. This is like the political commissar system that the Soviet Union operated under. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but these are the facts.
Dan Holtzman
Could you imagine if Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur came back and saw what was going on in the military today? Oh, you talk about not fitting in anymore. Those three guys, they’d have some tough sailing in today’s military.
Ron Scott
They would. And they were very much aware of the real threat wasn’t so much the military of the Soviet Union or Japan in those days.
The threat was ideological, and that’s what we’re dealing with today.
It’s a more benign form. But when you think about the summer of 2020, going into that presidential election, there were hundreds of riots, violent riots, billions of dollars in damage, more than two dozen people killed. They were perpetrated by this Black Lives Matter organization founded by three Marxist trained individuals and complemented by ANTIFA.
We’re talking hundreds of riots throughout the summer. When you visited their website, they admitted what they were doing. They even included one of their goals being to disrupt the Western nuclear family. That’s totally Marxist.
Dan Holtzman
It’s incredible that it’s gotten to this point, and a shame, because in many ways, the military really was at the forefront of racial integration throughout history. There were black units fighting for the Union back in the Civil War. Harry Truman–mandatory desegregation. I don’t know, Ron. You would know better than me. Like, 1950 ish 49 somewhere in there, early in his administration.
Ron Scott
1947.
Dan Holtzman
Oh, 47. It was that early. Okay. I thought it was closer to the Korean War. And now we’re getting to this point where it just doesn’t seem healthy in any way, shape, or form, does it?
Ron Scott
No, it doesn’t. In fact, and this is why it’s dangerous, because it’s very subtle and insidious in terms of how it’s playing out.
To give you an example, STARRS has filed 34 Freedom of Information Act requests. 34. And none of them have been completed within the statutory response time of ten work days, or 20 if it’s complex. In fact, Judicial Watch stepped in on our behalf last year and filed a lawsuit for two FOIA requests that we had filed and were unanswered.
One of them dealt with an assessment that the previous superintendent at the Academy had directed. This was in July, on July 8, 2020, and he let the academy family–graduates, cadets, faculty, parents– aware of his concern about systemic racism. He had directed an assessment to determine the extent of it at the Academy.
The following month, after it was due September, we filed in October of Freedom of Information Act request asking for a copy of that assessment. That was in October of 2020. It took a lawsuit by Judicial Watch on our behalf this past year. They filed it in September to get the court to compel the Academy to produce that report.
They finally produced one of the documents. We had asked for several. One of the documents was the assessment. 167 pages. 52 entire pages were redacted, completely redacted. And every page had For Official Use Only labels on it.
Why was it for official use only, number one? And number two, with that number of pages redacted what we could read in the actual unredacted part of the report, there was absolutely no evidence of racism, let alone systemic racism.
Dan Holtzman
And yet here we are.
Ron Scott
Yes, they use it to justify 90 cadets wearing purple arm cords, and that doesn’t speak to the paid diversity staff as part of the administration.
Dan Holtzman
Right. Is there anyone at the high levels of the military pushing back on this stuff, or are they just rolling over and going along to get along?
Ron Scott
The latter–going along to get along.
Dan Holtzman
That’s trouble.
Ron Scott
Yes. We’ve written letters to the Secretary of Defense, to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, to the Secretary of the Air Force. No responses.
But I have to tell you, we’re transparent. We have issued press releases letting people know what we have communicated to the Secretary of Defense and to the Chief that there’s been no response. So we’re doing our part to keep the Department of Defense accountable with the general public.
We’re also working with Congress. We’ve got great inroads. And one of the things we’re working on right now is to get Congress to emphasize the importance of Merit in the Department of Defense, the achievement, skills, talent, as opposed to racial preferences or sexual orientation preferences. Right now that’s what we have going on in the Department of Defense.
It’s very dangerous, and the recruiting issues are reflective of that now.
Dan Holtzman
Ron, we have a couple of minutes left. I want to talk to you about Memorial Day weekend. You’ve served a long time. Obviously, you have colleagues, guys you’ve served with who are no longer here. How do you hope people observe Memorial Day this weekend?
Ron Scott
I hope they would visit Google and type in World War II cemeteries and just look at the images of these cemeteries strewn across Western Europe and the Western Pacific, and what you’ll see are crosses and an occasional Star of David.
It speaks to the closing words of the commissioning oath that I recited numerous times upon commissioning every time I put on new rank.
The closing of that oath was, “So help me God.”
That was my inspiration. My willingness to put my life on the line was to protect what I believed America was all about, that there was a nation grounded in our Judeo-Christian tradition and that we’re accountable in this world and the next.
So we should do our duty.
Dan Holtzman
Is there anything more powerful than going to a cemetery on a holiday weekend like this, like Memorial Day weekend and seeing all the graves marked with American flags of those veterans who are no longer with us? That is powerful stuff, isn’t it?
Ron Scott
It’s very powerful. I mean, they gave it all and we benefited from it. And the sad part is, if we squander it because we don’t pay attention to our history and to the essence of who we are as America, we’re going to lose it.
Dan Holtzman
It’s so very important to the families of those as well, I found. We lost my dad about 14 months ago. He served during the Korean era. He did not serve in Korea, but he was in during what they call the Korean era. He has a marker reflecting that at his tombstone.
His brother survived the Battle of the Bulge. He was wounded. I just got a note from my cousin a month ago saying that her father’s grave marker has been replaced with a newer one reflecting his service in World War II and the Battle of the Bulge and just how much it meant to her, because the other one, frankly, was in pretty ratty condition. So it not only matters to remember those people, but it matters to the people doing the remembering.
Ron Scott
Absolutely. And if I can put a plug in, Dan, for a great American, Kendall Qualls and his wife Sheila have formed an outfit in Minnesota, and this stemmed from the George Floyd incident which took place in Minnesota. They have formed a program called “Take Charge” and they want to emphasize the importance of faith and family and how that really keeps America proud and prosperous. I want to put a plug in for that: “Take Charge”.
Dan Holtzman
Ron Scott, President and CEO of STARRS. You can find out more at STARRS.US. Ron, thanks for doing this. Thanks for your service. Hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend.
Ron Scott
Thank you.
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