https://www.wsj.com/articles/t...opwebshare_permalink

The U.S. Government’s Woke Training
The Editorial Board
6–8 minutes

Partial text follows

Read instructions from the Army, NASA, the VA, and more, obtained via open-records law.
Your browser does not support the audio tag.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has a gender gingerbread person. NASA says beware of micro-inequities. And if U.S. Army servicewomen express “discomfort showering with a female who has male genitalia,” what’s the brass’s reply? Talk to your commanding officer, but toughen up.

These are details from hundreds of pages of diversity and inclusion training materials used by the federal government in 2021 and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Everyone in corporate life knows such training, lampooned in the second episode of the TV show “The Office.” Yet taxpayers might be curious how their money is being spent to instruct the federal workforce these days.

Documents obtained via FOIA often lack context, so it’s hard to know the audience for any specific training and whether participation was voluntary or not-so-politely encouraged. With those caveats, press ahead.

***
Asked for its diversity training, the U.S. Army offered three modules on transgender policy, one for “Commanders at all levels,” another for “Special Staff,” and a third for “Units and Soldiers.” Notable is a series of vignettes that cover pronoun usage, urinalysis observation, and a serviceman who wants “to discuss his newly confirmed pregnancy.” With respect to showers, schedules can be adjusted or curtains installed. But a soldier’s gender in the Army’s system governs which facilities are used. Accommodating only a transgender soldier is prohibited.

Also, stiff upper lip: “Anyone may encounter individuals in barracks, bathrooms, or shower facilities with physical characteristics of the opposite sex.” Transgender soldiers aren’t “required or expected to modify or adjust their behavior based on the fact that they do not ‘match’ other Soldiers.”

The VA’s “Managing Gender Diversity” training has sections on pronouns and embracing “gender-expansiveness.” One slide lists terms, including “gender fluid” and “pansexual,” while instructing: “List your personal ‘biases’ in the BIAS box.” A game of “PRIVILEGE BINGO” includes such items as “NO CRIMINAL RECORD,” “MILITARY EXPERIENCE,” and “MARRIED.”

A NASA training on “Allyship for Executives” says that the term “African American” is “utilized heavily in white spaces,” and it “can make Black people feel excluded as the term tends to ‘other.’” Another NASA slide series explains that inclusive leaders “are willing to be ‘uncomfortable’” in exploring “race, gender, sexual orientation” and so forth. “We have been taught to act as if we are colorblind and gender-neutral,” it adds, but “these efforts actually limit us.”

A NASA tip sheet on microaggressions gives examples that include, “Asking an Asian person to help with a Math or Science problem,” as well as saying, “America is a melting pot.” A slide deck on inclusive language suggests nixing “the poor” and substituting “people dealing with economic hardship.” A talk to a NASA center by Janice Underwood, then the state of Virginia’s chief diversity officer, urges: “Walk toward the discomfort—when patterns of white supremacy are named or questioned, predictable defensive responses will emerge.” Ms. Underwood now leads the diversity bureau at the federal Office of Personnel Management.

A Department of Homeland Security presentation on “Inclusive Diversity” says that micro-inequities can be fought by micro-affirmations. “Social and Physical Pain Produce Similar Brain Responses,” it argues, using a cartoon rendition of two brain scans.

A National Science Foundation seminar presents data about the race and gender of the NSF’s workforce, before sending participants to breakout rooms to discuss. A National Endowment for the Arts program offers definitions for terms such as “White Fragility,” “Heterosexism,” and “Misogynoir.”

Some government bodies refused to release training materials created by outside vendors, citing a FOIA exemption for “confidential” commercial information. But contracts and lists of courses can shed a little light.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided training orders of about $313,000 for a slew of courses, such as “8 Tactics for Courageous Workplace Conversations About Race,” “Let’s Talk About Systemic Racism, Unconscious Bias and Privilege,” and “Silence is a Statement: Understanding Race in the Workplace.”

The Environmental Protection Agency’s course lists feature “Everyday Anti-Racism” and “Psychological Safety: Building a Culture of Inclusion and Innovation.” The Food and Drug Administration’s menu offers a two-hour seminar, “Checking Your Blindspot: Ways to Find and Fix Unconscious Bias.”

***
These examples are, well, non-inclusive. Many of the materials are dull recitations of anti-retaliation policies or polite reminders, for example, not to pet somebody’s service dog. But one lesson is that there is now a conveyor belt from academia to the diversity-industrial complex. The portmanteau “misogynoir” was coined in 2010 on a blog called Crunk Feminist Collective. Eleven years later it’s in a training for government workers.

This type of re-education was accelerated by President Biden’s 2021 executive order directing agencies to “increase the availability and use of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility training.” It’s a form of political indoctrination intended to impose woke values on the vast federal bureaucracy and U.S. military.

You’d think the agencies would be proud to post all of these materials online, where it doesn’t require a long wait and a records request to read them. But since they don’t, we thought readers might like to see their taxpayer dollars and government values at work

The inmates are running the asylum.

quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
The inmates are running the asylum.

Talk about a micro-aggression to the mentally divergent! Mandatory sensitivity training for you!

This is what an enforced cultural revolution looks like…

Notwithstanding coming from a military family, and having served myself, this right here is exactly why I have encouraged my children to avoid serving in our armed forces. There is no reason to subject oneself to this social radicalism backed with the force of the UCMJ.

There is a recruiter who calls all the time. I point out these things, and you can tell that he knows exactly why I’m concerned, but can say nothing. I feel a little sorry for him. He’s trying to sell me on the emperor’s fine set of new clothes.

IMO, there should not be ANY transgender soldiers in the military. Don't enlist them and the problem goes away. The purpose of the military is (as the Marines put it) "to break things and kill people", and ought not to be a place for social experimentation.

flashguy

Maybe the Army should get back to their goals of fighting/winning wars...

Unless, within the next 50 years we need to get our ass kicked by China to drive home the point that this isnt a social experiment.

I could not have served under such lunacy. Service can be crazy enough without this happy horseshit! Rome ended with such…

Dating myself a bit here -

When I served on ship -
there were no women aboard
No one had a personal computer
No one had a cell phone
We heard from family and friends via the US Postal Service - and that was only occasionally.

Now we have (briefly stated)
all sexes aboard ship
pregnancy issues
Everyone carrying a cell phone?
Everyone, no matter where you are in the world, connected to family via internet, EVERY DAY?

In the “old days” we had a unity of purpose, a focus. We were detached from the trivial worries at home. Women were ashore or at home (excepting the very few USN enlisted). Our job was to be the best fighting ship we could be. The “I’m this way, you’re that way” kind of crap didn’t exist. It was only “Us” and we better be damned good at keeping “us” afloat or we would ALL go down together.

Today - what a mess. Cell phones, internet, problems from home - potentially every day -(johnny has been bad at school again today… I broke my cell phone again… the car is broke so I bought another one… )

And the ship and crew are supposed to be “battle ready”?

No wonder recruitment is down

These Are The Top 7 Times The Military Went Woke In 2022

MICAELA BURROW
REPORTER
December 31, 2022
12:37 PM ET

The Department of Defense (DOD) doubled down on “woke” initiatives in 2022 amid rising criticism from experts and politicians that the focus on progressive issues could undercut military readiness.

Under the Biden administration, the Department of Defense (DOD) pushed through a raft of policies elevating racial and gender diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as fighting climate change, as a department priority. This “woke” agenda, brought on by elected and appointed leaders, counteracts the military’s culture of merit and distracts from the DOD’s primary mission to defend the U.S. from external threats, critics argue.

“Wokeness” describes “social, ideological, or environmental policies imposed on the military — not to improve warfighting capabilities — but rather to serve a progressive political agenda,” Thomas Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The administration is seeking to push its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion agenda within the military.”

1. Teaching Critical Race Theory at service academies

The U.S. Air Force Academy reportedly offered programming on “gender-inclusivity” over recent years, according to teaching materials leaked in the fall of 2022. The Academy promoted a seminar on “Transgender visibility” in September, and in 2021 it rolled out a new curriculum instructing cadets to avoid gendered language, including words like “mom” and “dad.”

At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, cadets learned Critical Race Theory as a part of the class curriculum, according to more than 500 pages of documents obtained by Judicial Watch in June. The documents showed lectures titled things like “White Power at West Point” and “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.”

2. Ditching male-centric training practices at Marine Corps boot camps

A 739-page Congressionally-mandated study to devise a “gender-integrated training model” for the U.S. Marine Corps, completed in late 2022, recommends removing gender identifiers like “sir” and “ma’am” for drill instructors and exposing each recruit to both male and female instructors, according to Marine Corps Times. The report found that the Marine Corps implicitly and explicitly appears to favor male Marines...

Complete article:

https://dailycaller.com/2022/1...itary-wokeness-2022/

quote:

Originally posted by 10X-Shooter:
I could not have served under such lunacy. Service can be crazy enough without this happy horseshit! Rome ended with such…

That is what they are hoping for. The purge of conservatives so they have a woke leftist military.

Imagine what the Iranians would to to a captured transgender soldier. They throw gay men off buildings.

quote:

Originally posted by Ozarkwoods:

quote:

Originally posted by 10X-Shooter:
I could not have served under such lunacy. Service can be crazy enough without this happy horseshit! Rome ended with such…

That is what they are hoping for. The purge of conservatives so they have a woke leftist military.

My daughter and son-in-law can testify to that.
She's out, he's getting out ASAP.

quote:

Originally posted by RogB:

A NASA training on “Allyship for Executives” says that the term “African American” is “utilized heavily in white spaces,” and it “can make Black people feel excluded as the term tends to ‘other.’”

Well then the solution is to stop identifying people by their race! Who cares what race someone is? Why categorize any NASA employee by their race?

I’ll get out next month after 21 years. My family has had someone serving since 1820, but it ends with me; my kids will not join nor do I want them to. We need to figure ourselves out as a nation… which I’m praying we can do peacefully.

Pentagon Senior Leaders Unfocused on Combat Readiness

Forrest Marion
Jan 6, 2023

During the so-called "Phoney War" from the fall of 1939 to the spring of 1940, the former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lord Gort – reassigned to command the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France against the German attack that everyone knew was to come – inexplicably remained attentive to nonessential concerns. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s biographer wrote that during the eight months prior to the fateful date of 10 May 1940, when Hitler launched his attack on France, Gort “never once conducted an administrative, signals, Intelligence or even movement exercise.” He was entirely unprepared and ill-suited for the command he now held. One of Montgomery’s trusted subordinates, serving at Gort’s general headquarters at Arras, France, “. . . found the most amateur arrangements conceivable.” In one striking case of misdirected energy, Gort’s deputy “concentrated entirely on the wines and food for the mess of the Quartermaster-General at Noyel-les Vion, a village some miles west of Arras. How, in such circumstances, the BEF was supposed to swell itself into an eventual formation of two armies, with nearly half a million men, was incredible,” wrote Nigel Hamilton.

But Gort’s concern over the selection of wines for the officers’ mess shortly before the German onslaught against France in 1940 is not unlike the misguided activities of the Pentagon’s senior leaders amid gathering war clouds eight decades later. Since January 2021, the defense department’s obsession with Critical Race [racist] Theory (CRT) – and its “close cousin,” as Dr. Carol Swain describes – Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI), adds no more to the combat readiness of the U.S. armed forces than did Gort’s choice wines. Worse, the Pentagon’s costly, counterproductive actions – including the virtue-signaling hunt for “extremists” within the ranks, renaming military posts, and promoting social-political causes from abortion-on-demand to pronoun preferences to drag-queen-military-library events to transgender reassignment procedures to unproven vaccine mandates – actually are lowering those intangible but indispensable elements of combat readiness known as morale and trust. (In terms of extremism, does not the discharging of trained personnel unwilling to subject themselves to an unproven vaccine, especially during a manpower shortfall, seem an example?) At least in the BEF’s case, the wine selections offered some momentary morale boost for British officers, albeit most of whom sadly lacked the professionalism required to engage the German Wehrmacht with any chance of success in 1940.

At least within socially permitted categories dependent on time and place, successful militaries have been based mainly upon merit. But today’s Pentagon seeks a paradigm change in the name of its god, Diversity, which means everything to its leadership. Years ago, conservative scholar and author, Professor Thomas Sowell, observed: “The mystical benefits of diversity are nonexistent, however politically correct it is to proclaim such benefits.” Two months ago, during oral arguments in an affirmative action case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas rightly observed that diversity “seems to mean everything for everyone.”

It is a well-known phenomenon that when a concept, doctrine, or program comes to mean everything, the overreach has the opposite effect. The thing, in fact, is reduced to nothingness...

Complete article:

https://www.realcleardefense.c...eadiness_874150.html