On Wednesday's Morning Joe, in the course of condemning Pete Hegseth's nomination as Secretary of Defense, Joe Scarborough got up on his high horse and fumed that it is a "lie" and an "insult" to claim that the US military has gone woke.
The facts refute Scarborough's faux outrage. There's overwhelming evidence of the military's wokeness, and this report by Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Chip Roy, entitled "Woke Warfighters," does an excellent job of documenting it.
Scarborough brought in retired general and MSNBC analyst Barry McCaffrey, who offered fawning praise of Scarborough's "terrific statement." McCaffrey even defended Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal, claiming that rather than being a "disgrace," it was actually a "miracle operation" because we were able to evacuate many civilians.
Here are just some of the many examples, drawn from the Rubio/Roy report, demonstrating how the military, under the Obama and Biden administrations, has gone woke--and how Scarborough is so outrageously wrong in his denial of that truth.
- Bishop Garrison was the man in charge of the the Biden administration’s “Countering Extremist Activity Working Group.” Garrison is a rabid partisan who routinely denigrated conservatives and has stated that “systemic racism is one of our greatest national security challenges.” Garrison has also promoted the deeply unhistorical “1619 Project,” which argues that the beginning of slavery in Britain’s American colonies, not the Declaration of Independence, is the real founding of America, and that everything wrong with society today can be traced back to slavery.
- The Department of Defense Education Agency (DODEA) exists to operate K-12 schools around the world and in the United States. The DoD chose Kelsea Wing, a radical extremist, as Chief DEI Officer at DODEA. Wing has tweeted: “I'm exhausted with these white folx [a woke term] in these [professional development] sessions. [T]his lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too…. I had to stop the session and give Karen the BUSINESS.” (Caudacity is a derogatory word to describe the audacity of white people.) Wing also wrote a book to teach white children that they have white privilege and that “white privilege hurts a lot of people.”
- The Biden Administration wanted to indoctrinate a new generation of military leadership at the U.S. Service Academies with Critical Race Theory (CRT).
- An admiral told midshipmen at the Naval Academy that they needed to read "How to Be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi – a book that teaches that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” that capitalism is racist, and that people by virtue of their race are inherently oppressive or privileged while others are inherently victimized or oppressed.
- A professor at the Air Force Academy boasted about her desire to make students learn how to “identify the structural racism and inequality that has been endemic in American society.” It is important, this professor argued, for students to understand that “racism was ingrained in the system from the beginning” to understand why racism persists today.
- Cadets at West Point are being taught that “in order to understand racial inequality and slavery, it is first necessary to address whiteness.” A slide for a class at West Point obtained by Freedom of Information requests argues that “white people and people of color live racially different structured lives.” The slide goes on to list three characteristics of Whiteness, describing it as “a location of structural advantage [and] race privilege,” “a standpoint or place from which white people look at themselves and the rest of society,” and “a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.”
- The Biden Administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy is supposed to outline America’s strategic interests, the threats we face, and how to counter them. In discussing how to “strengthen the effectiveness of the force,” the first topic listed by the Biden Administration is“promoting diversity and inclusion.”
- The United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is responsible for the elite, special operations missions executed all around the world. Yet even this hallowed institution has not been spared the undue influence of DEI. In the first lines of SOCOM’s 2021 Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan, Chief Master Sergeant Smith and General Clarke write that “diversity and inclusion are operational imperatives.” The plan goes on to say that “leaders must integrate diversity and inclusion efforts into unit goals, mission objectives, talent management initiatives, and operational priorities for a successful implementation.” The plan makes “diversity in [Special Operations Forces] an operational imperative.”
- Our military has – or at least, historically has had – rigorous and robust medical requirements and restrictions on who can and cannot serve. Among disqualifying conditions are: peanuts or gluten allergies; learning disorders like ADD or ADHD that require medication; a history of depression or anxiety that required medication, treatment, or hospitalization; and skin diseases like eczema and psoriasis. People cannot even enlist with Invisalign or braces until they are removed. And yet, today’s woke military is now proudly promoting and celebrating sex reassignment procedures, which can have months-long recovery periods, with complete recovery taking “up to one year” for some procedures.
- Less than a week into his presidency, President Biden reversed Secretary Mattis’s policy, thereby preventing any service member from being forced out due to his or her gender dysphoria. On “International Transgender Day of Visibility,” the DoD prohibited “discrimination on the basis of gender identity or an individual’s identification as transgender” and established “a means to access into the military in one’s self-identifying gender.”
- This instruction allows members of each service to “transition” while on active duty, including “gender reassignment surgery.” Once a person completes the gender transition, his or her marker in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) will be changed to the gender of his or her choosing. This will allow the person to use bathroom andshower facilities of his or her choosing.
- Services are now requiring their members to receive training on the transgender service policy, including advice on how to use pronouns properly and when to recommend their subordinates consider gender reassignment surgery.
- The Marines also tweeted a Pride Month image with rainbow-tipped bullets on a Marine helmet, featuring the words “proud to serve.”
- The Air Force updated its writing guide to allow airmen and guardians to include pronouns in their signature block.
- An Air Force Academy slide presentation titled, “Diversity & Inclusion: What it is, why we care, & what we can do,” advises cadets to use gender-neutral language and avoid terms such as “mom” and “dad.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
1/15/25
6:15 am ETJOE SCARBOROUGH: And it's just an insult, just an absolute. And again, there's so much to talk about here. But we've just got to go full stop, because I'm sick and tired of people tearing down the men and women in uniform that are protecting us. And I'm sick and tired.
You know, people want to lie about the economy. They can lie about the economy. I don't take that as personally. I mean, because that's their own problem, because they're going to be judged by how they do compared to the United States economy right now, which is the envy of the world. We have record low jobless rates. The stock market's at record highs. I mean, they'll have to deal with that.
But this insult, that somehow our military is weak and woke is just an outrageous lie. And it's an insult to our men and women in uniform.
I want to bring in right now General Barry McAffrey. You talk about American heroes. He's got a little dust on his boots through the years. And sir, we thank you. We thank you for your service to this country. Thank you also for getting up very early this morning on the West Coast.
I just, I want you to give me your general feelings about what you saw yesterday. But first, let's blow apart this lie that our military is weak and woke, and not the strongest in the world by far, first. Could we do that, sir?
BARRY McCAFFREY: Boy, that was such a terrific opening statement on your part.
And by the way, everybody goes back to Afghanistan, the disgrace of the withdrawal. Mr. Trump ran for presidency and said he was going to get us out of Afghanistan. And he handed Biden, who ran for office to get out of Afghanistan, a situation with 2,500 troops on the ground.
We pulled out over 100,000 screaming civilians in a miracle operation, that could have been the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, because we put seven elite battalions on the ground and intimidated the Taliban.
