(April 8, official editorial of the Washington Examiner) In the name of fighting extremism and racism, President Joe Biden’s Department of Defense is promoting racial extremism. On this initiative, the Pentagon should stand down.
In February, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered that “every service member” should participate in a “stand-down” (a training session) to address and counteract “extremism in the ranks.” The order came in response to reports and fears that the number of “white supremacists, and other domestic terrorists such as anti-government violent extremists” was growing among U.S. armed forces personnel.
Aerial view of the Pentagon from the Potomac River entrance at Arlington, Virginia (VA).
White supremacism is a serious ill. Even if some may have said the concern was overblown, Austin’s initiative was at least defensible and even laudable, as long as it focused on concrete actions and military responsibilities. Alas, and perhaps predictably, the program has devolved not just into social justice nonsense that is not properly the province of the armed forces but into the promotion of claptrap that exacerbates racial divides rather than heals them.
Credit the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal for unearthing the disturbing new information about these particular stand-downs. The outlet published the agenda for a March 22 “all-hands” meeting that fleshed out the “policy … to address extremism.” The agenda included four pages of “additional resources” that leaders should consult to aid in these stand-down sessions.
There was no “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” nor was it a recommendation of, say, Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the civil rights era. It wasn’t a balanced list of scholarly research on neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Instead, the Pentagon was telling its men and women to imbibe tendentious works of hard-left organizations and writers and of black separatists.
Among the recommended resources is the Southern Poverty Law Center, the wealthy, widely discredited (and discreditable) left-wing organization that wrongly includes ordinary conservative outlets among its once-vaunted lists of “hate groups” in the United States….
[The full editorial is at this link.]
