West Point • Woke Agenda

The War on Woke at West Point

29 October 2026

STARRS

The MacArthur Society and STARRS are mentioned in the below New York Magazine article. It’s written by Jasper Craven, the author of a new book about the “problem” of masculinity in the military. He writes for far-left Mother Jones among other leftist publications. We wrote about him previously here:

Anti-masculinity in the military lecture at Vassar featuring former West Point prof

Craven attended the recent West Point Board of Visitors meeting which many members of the MacArthur Society also attended.

Let’s dissect it (links in articles are ours):

The War on Woke at West Point
Pete Hegseth’s attack on the academy is upending military education

By Jasper Craven | New York Magazine

On October 9, the Board of Visitors, a rotating body of trustees for America’s most distinguished military academy, gathered in the Haig Room, a sixth-floor suite in West Point’s grand library with coffered ceilings, wallpaper patterned with red missiles, and the service pistol of the room’s eponymous general displayed under glass. The agenda was saturated with the usual soldierdom.

Lieutenant General James B. Bartholomees III teed up presentations demonstrating how the academy builds “multi-dimensional, multi-domain leaders.” Cadets highlighted a recent combat-diving trip with special-operations forces in Key West and a project with Palantir on drone targeting.

There was even an emotional monologue on the excellence of West Point students from pop pollster Frank Luntz, who is a senior fellow. During his remarks, Luntz pointed to a strong-jawed cadet named Nelson who had engaged in a semi-viral push-up contest with Republican senator Josh Hawley earlier this year. “The greatest Americans in this country right now,” Luntz said, “are in this room.”

From this meeting, it would be hard for an outsider to see that West Point has been, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, invaded by weakness and wokeness.

OUR NOTE: Of course, because it’s now 2026, a year after Commander-in-Chief Trump and Secretary of WAR Hegseth gave orders to remove all wokeness from West Point. Why would he would see wokeness there now?

Over the past few years, a conservative military cadre, led by Hegseth, has claimed the 224-year-old academy has been dangerously compromised by civilians and the left. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth alleges topics like “white rage” and “transgenderism” dominate lectures. “Even the superintendent’s office, I was told, was always tuned to CNN or MSNBC,” he writes. “Fox News was not allowed.”

OUR NOTE: Now he is taking about what happened during the Biden years, which are over. See our articles on what was happening at West Point, starting from the beginning, that did show the academy was dangerously compromised by leftwing woke ideology. By the way, The War on Warriors is a GREAT book to read. STARRS provided Hegseth with a lot of information on the wokeness in the military. Thanks for mentioning this book which led President Trump to choose him as Secretary of WAR.

Pete Hegseth’s ‘The War on Warriors’ examines how the military was ‘manipulated into going woke’ by the left

At board meetings like this one, the complaints are often voiced by the MacArthur Society, a group founded in 2023 by alumni concerned about their alma mater’s “focus on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”

 OUR NOTE: The MacArthur Society was indeed concerned about Marxist-based CRT/DEI ideology during the previous years and now wants to make sure these leftwing ideology don’t return.

During a brief recess of the Board of Visitors, I asked Matthew Newgent, MacArthur’s vice-president of donor relations, what he thought of West Point’s current ideological state.

“Are you familiar with the 45 communist goals?” he asked, referencing a theorized plot of a global takeover by the Reds first articulated by a former FBI agent in his book The Naked Communist.

I said “no.”

OUR NOTE: Color us shocked this leftwing author never heard of it. By the way, here are the goals:

Communist Goals from 1963

Then Newgent pitched me on his proprietary AI software, Constitution Analytics, which promises to scrutinize curricula, federal contracts, and, it seems, anything else to make sure they align with the ideas of the Founders.

The claims that West Point is now full of communists are shaky. But this has not stopped Hegseth from launching an unprecedented campaign to reconfigure military education by attempting to obliterate the small germ of a liberal-arts curriculum that exists at the academy.

OUR NOTE: “Now”? This reporter has it all backwards. There WERE problems and Trump and Hegseth set a course when they arrived to fix the problems, which are now mostly gone by now. He’s late to the party; he’s observing a West Point that is mostly fixed and focused on warfighting, not wokeness.

In Donald Trump’s second term, the Pentagon has banned various books, student groups, and English and history courses at West Point. Hegseth has called for the end of tenure for civilian professors, many of whom have been fired or pushed out. Civilians make up only 27 percent of teaching staff but have historically been the keepers of academic freedom on campus.

A previously unreported October memo from the dean’s office says these professors will soon undergo five “progress reviews” a year. (A West Point spokesperson said the academy “conducts performance reviews in accordance with all Department of War and Army policies.”)

Last year, Graham Parsons, a professor who taught philosophy and ethics at the academy for 13 years, wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that the school was aiming to “indoctrinate, not educate” America’s future military leaders under Hegseth. Soon after, he was placed under investigation, and he eventually resigned. “It’s a travesty and it’s a shame,” one longtime civilian professor told me. “It’s exhausting feeling all this suspicion toward civilian faculty, like we are trying to get away with something.”

OUR NOTE: That’s rich, Prof. Parsons saying West Point was “aiming to indoctrinate” future leaders under Hegseth when that’s exactly what West Point was doing in the previous woke years: indoctrinating students with Marxist-rooted Critical Race Theory and its praxis DEI ideology. Talk about “PROJECTION”! Oh, and here’s Parsons:

Buh-Bye West Point

Adam Kalkstein, a self-described conservative and a West Point geography professor of more than 17 years, alleges in a lawsuit he was recently fired for refusing to “defy science” and cease teaching that humans contribute to climate change, even as he framed it in relation to military readiness and the future of conflict. Kalkstein told me West Point administrators said if he expressed his concerns publicly, “we are not only going after you, but we are coming after your entire department.”

Hegseth and the MacArthur folks see these restrictions as progress. The secretary of Defense boasted in a recent speech that he was ridding the military of “fatties,”“beardos,”“weirdos,” and “radicals.”

OUR NOTE: That is not correct, the Secretary of WAR said, “No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.” Craven left out “trannies” (be inclusive!).

And more changes are likely to come: Trump appointed to the Board of Visitors David Bellavia, Hegseth’s former colleague at a veterans-advocacy group, and disgraced former general Michael Flynn. Flynn skipped the October 9 meeting to speak about “cultural Marxism” at a megachurch in Maricopa County, Arizona.

OUR NOTE: Gen. Flynn is not disgraced and yes, that was our “America at a Crossroads” event he spoke at. See Gen. Flynn’s speech here.

But at a board gathering last year, he complained West Point was becoming like the “social-justice university” he had attended, the University of Rhode Island. (In 2014, URI awarded Flynn an honorary degree; in 2022, it revoked the honor after Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.)

Within West Point, though, there are real divides. Senator Tim Kaine, the Board of Visitors’ most pragmatic member, said that in his private discussions, military faculty members frequently “brag” about their civilian counterparts.

OUR NOTE: Kaine is the “most PRAGMATIC member”??????

Truck Laughing Emoji GIFfrom Truck GIFs

And the changes have surprised even some right-wing partisans. During the October 9 meeting, board member Maureen Bannon, a 2010 West Point graduate (and daughter of Steve), asked school officials about a professor’s “alarming” allegation the academy had recently done away with three classes: Race, Ethnicity, Nation; Topics in Gender History; and Rights, Liberties & the U.S. Citizen. She was told, in adherence to Hegseth’s order, they had been either abolished or “modified.”

OUR NOTE: Uh no, she was using a question given to her by the MacArthur Society to makes sure those courses were GONE.

What’s lost without civilians is both easy and difficult to quantify. Kalkstein’s work on soldier heat exposure, for instance, has helped improve resiliency among cadets during summer training exercises. Many veterans have also defended the humanities, including those who were POWs during the Vietnam War, who said it was literature, not isolation training, that saved them. The late senator John McCain credited a poem with keeping him sane in captivity.

OUR NOTE: Sooooooo, is he saying West Point should be teaching America’s future warfighters poetry instead of SERE training??

Retired lieutenant general Mark Hertling, a West Point graduate and former assistant professor, finds it laughable that the MacArthur bunch sees its alma mater as a bastion of left-wing extremism.

OUR NOTE: Right, the man who publicly and “proudly” endorsed left-wing Kamala Harris because America needs a “serious and capable Commander-in-Chief” and said she would make an excellent CinC. We find THAT laughable.

Truck Laughing Emoji GIFfrom Truck GIFs

Like others I spoke to, Hertling derided these critics as men with insubstantial military careers seeking revenge.

Flynn was ousted from two top intelligence roles, under both the Obama and Trump administrations; just after January 6, Hegseth was flagged by a fellow servicemember as an “insider threat” for his tattoos.

Matthew Lohmeier, the onetime executive vice-president of STARRS, a sister group of MacArthur worried about wokeness at the Air Force Academy, was fired from the Space Force after writing a book called Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military. (Lohmeier is now Hegseth’s undersecretary of the Air Force.)

OUR NOTE: All three are top, honorable, decent men. And by the way, that’s another GREAT book to read, thanks for mentioning it.

“I don’t think personally his moral character is such where you would want him standing in front of a bunch of cadets,” Hertling told me of Hegseth.

Really?

One West Point alumnus, who requested anonymity to protect his ongoing relationship with the school, compared Hegseth’s academic purge to his broader hunt for woke language in the Pentagon, a dragnet that accidentally flagged photos of the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. “The administration is using blunt tools,” he said.

Hertling worries these policies could seriously degrade military competency — especially the attacks on civilian professors, who he said bring vital balance and substance to academic departments: “Why Hegseth would want to fuck with that I have no idea.”

OUR NOTE: And thus the elegant and refined last statement that characterizes who Hertling really is and his utter cluelessness on how the Biden/Harris administration completely degraded military competency.

A West Point grad said this, “Hertling is a thorough-going leftist. I’ve run across examples of his despicable behavior several times in the past. And regarding “…insubstantial military careers…” I suspect I could match him rather easily for time spent in hostile areas where bad guys were shooting real bullets. Seems he is always the go-to guy when lefties want a senior officer to support their efforts to undermine the military or the country.”

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