The military is going “woke” — and there’s a lot of funding and institutional energy behind it.
According to a trove of documents obtained by the conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch, the U.S. Department of Defense is being overrun with diversity programs, equality administrators and so-called inclusive social justice trainings.
So much so, that Pentagon bureaucrats appear intent on turning the nation’s defense headquarters into a progressive college campus.
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch obtained 1,483 pages of training materials and 26 pages of corresponding budget records from the DoD’s Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute.
The materials are used by the department’s “equal opportunity advisors” to train military members on a wide range of diversity and inclusion topics.
The Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute received nearly $20 million in taxpayer funding during President Barack Obama’s second term, from 2012 to 2017. The Institute’s website claims that it’s “propelled by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”
But leaders of the era would be hard-pressed to recognize the bizarre initiatives now being imposed on the country’s servicemen and women.
The document release included “Student Study Guides” written for “Equal Opportunity Advisor Courses” that cast aspersions on military personnel who “believe that human similarities are more important than differences.”
The guides also instruct service members to acknowledge their “privilege” when it’s pointed out to them, that heterosexuals have “sexual orientation privilege” and that “religious privilege” is an ongoing problem.
A chapter called “Power and Privilege” states that heterosexual privilege involves the “marginalization of non-heterosexual lifestyles and the view that heterosexuality is normal.”
People who disagree with homosexual lifestyles and same-sex marriage due to their religious objections are said to engage in “principium,” or a form of discrimination that “avoids exploration based on a religious or personal principle.”
Guide notes also assert that transsexuals, transgenders and gays are frequently denied “freedom enjoyed by heterosexual couples,” and that all service members should be encouraged to “decode your social identity.”
But the provisions on race are particularly disturbing.
Training materials state that “Whites are the majority in senior leadership positions” and that contributes to the “perpetuation of racism.”
Racism is also divided into four categories, traditional, symbolic, modern and aversive.
Aversive racists “put high value on egalitarian beliefs,” according to the authors.
Modern racists, they say, think minorities are “undeserving of special efforts to redress past inequities,” and will utter racist sentiments such as, “discrimination is a thing of the past,” “tactics and demands of activists are unfair” and “racism is bad.”
The Student Study Guides contain plenty of warnings against stereotypes while laughably engaging in ignorant stereotypes throughout.
Women are said to communicate using “a passive/assertive style,” whereas men communicate “using an assertive/aggressive style in efforts to accomplish tasks, achieve status, and dominate the conversation.”
The majority of whites are located in the South, a document states.
A section on Asian Americans says that “self-control, discipline, competitiveness and education are important elements in Japanese–American culture” — as if they aren’t qualities in other cultures; Japan is also a country, not a race.
“Stereotypes may or may not originate in a kennel [sic] of truth …” reads page 563 of a Student Study Guide.
In many places, the diversity materials are unhinged.
One document attempts historical revisionism by claiming that in previous American wars “many women masqueraded as men in order to serve their country.”
A study guide on sexism says that killing one’s spouse is an example of sexist behavior because such an act, presumably being a man killing a woman, falls under the gender discrimination category of “extermination.”
“Privilege will never go away until the systems in our society that cause discrimination go away,” a study guide suggests while instructing equal opportunity advisors to “work to make those inequitable systems visible.”
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, issued a statement on Thursday after the investigative powerhouse posted the record request documents to its website.
“These documents show that the Department of Defense has been indoctrinating our troops with anti-American and racially inflammatory ‘training,’” Fitton said.
“We must protect our military service members from being brainwashed by the divisive, anti-American propaganda fueling the leftist insurrectionists who are right now trying to destroy our country.”
