On the Victor Davis Hanson Show, he and the cohost discuss the article, Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Reign Supreme At The Air Force Academy, written by STARRS Board of Advisors Scott Sturman (USAFA ’72) and STARRS Vice Chairman MG Joe Arbuckle (USA ret). He also mentions another STARRS article, Culture Change at USAFA: Why Six Professors Resigned.
Listen:
Excerpt:
Victor Davis Hanson:
“. . . . . There is a lot of criticism about the Air Force Academy’s woke agenda. This is very important because one of the way we maintain deterrence is traditionally when American pilots go up in the skies, whether it’s in the Balkans or whether it was during the Reagan era against the Libyans or whether it’s in the skies over the eastern Mediterranean, nobody screws around with them because they’re superior and they’re usually their planes are superior or the pilots are considered the best in the world.
When you start tampering with that and you have sort of like Stanford University word list where you can’t use the word Mom or Dad because some Air Force Academy’s children or children of one parents, or they suggest you say “you all” rather than you, you’re really talking about it’s a sin of commission and omission.
You’re not only destroying morale and sending a message to cadets there that your promotion and your career will not entirely be adjudicated by merit, but it will have something to do with your race.
In other words, when you’re in a class and you look around and you think, ‘if I am nonwhite, I’m going to get an edge, and if I am white, I’m going to not have that edge.’
It has nothing to do with class. They do not ask my Middle Eastern cadet or my black cadet or my Latino cadet, whether they were the children of dentists or doctors or oil money. They don’t care. It’s just superficial appearance.
That’s going to destroy morale. It already has.
That’s why they’re short recruitment and people don’t want to teach there in the same degree they did in the past.
There are no brave Superintendents, Commandants—nobody wants to go in there and say this is antithetical to battlefield efficacy.
It will eventually mean that really good people are not going to go into the Air Force. And the people who were in there were going to get cynical because they feel they’re not going to be promoted on how they fly a plane or or shoot a missile.
I don’t know how we’re going to maintain our preeminence unless you assume–and I don’t assume–that these people think the United States is so far ahead of everybody else, that we’re so powerful that we can afford to have a Commissariat Commissar system that monitors our ideology, sex race, ethnic background.
I don’t think we are. I don’t think we have any margin of error.
China certainly doesn’t do this. Russia doesn’t do this. There’s a reason why they don’t do it. They did it before under Mao in China and they did it under Stalin and Khrushchev and probably Brezhnev as well, where they had commissars that use ideological criteria to adjudicate performance.
They found they couldn’t compete with us because the West didn’t do that. Now the West is doing it and they don’t. It’s, you know, bizarre.
. . . . If you study the Cultural Revolution under Mao or what happened to the Soviet army, the Red Army in the first year of the invasion, and by Germany, you can see where that leads to it.
It just means that your whole system breaks down and it breeds just, well go watch Enemy at the Gates and see what a commissar is. I know it’s a fictional; it’s based on a real story, supposedly.
You can see how even in a fictional context, all the criteria that go into making decisions that are not based on battlefield, but on propaganda or public relations or advancement.
The Soviet Union said we’re going to promote people that show the lot that they are the loudest and the longest demagogues about the Soviet system and Marxist-Leninist dogma.
We can say the same thing with the universities, the English department or Classics department, I can see the damage there, but I don’t think it’s going to directly affect our F-35 program or the pilots in Iraq.
This? this does. The people who are corrupting these academies come from the humanities or the social sciences.
It’s a very lucrative thing for a DEI contractor to get these bids. They go in and they say, read this and this and this and you’re racist, this, this, this. You over here are victims, you over there are victimizers. Hey, you back there, is an oppressed, you next to me are an oppressor. That’s just designed to divide people.
I don’t know where everybody got this idea that diversity was good. It’s always unity.
Diversity is a challenge. Diversity of opinion might be good, but right to divide up a society by your superficial appearance? That’s divisiveness, not diversity.
Unity is what you want.
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