by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
When people complain about woke culture, they usually think about universities. They are sick of fake courses, demands for diversity, constant complaints of oppression, and the like. What we need to realize is that the situation is much worse than that. Woke culture in universities is just one part of an insidious plot to make our entire society woke.
Dr. Paul Alexander writes on May 9, ““’When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
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‘As part of the larger military-wide effort to promote diversity in the service’s pilot ranks, the 19th Air Force command near San Antonio, Texas, ‘clustered’ racial minorities and female trainees into one class, dubbed ‘America’s Class,’ to find out if doing so would improve the pilots’ graduation rates. However, not only did the effort fail to boost minority and women candidates’ success rates, but officers involved say they were ordered to engage in potentially unlawful discrimination by excluding white males from the class, documents show.
‘When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
A ‘significant backlog’ of pilot candidates waiting to begin classes offered the 19th Air Force, which conducts pilot training for the entire service at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, a chance to build a class from scratch, a spokesperson for Air Education and Training Command (AETC) told the DCNF. So, the 19th Air Force ‘clustered’ candidates from ‘underrepresented groups” into Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (SUPT) class 21-15, with the initial intent of roughly mirroring the racial and gender makeup of the U.S.”
The entire defense establishment has become woke, and this has become a means of spreading the American Empire. Fraser Myers points out: “‘I am intersectional… I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder… I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be… I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are…’
These are not the words of some blue-haired student or tedious Instagram activist. Rather, they come from a recruitment video for the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency – infamous for ‘enhanced interrogation’, drone warfare and trafficking drugs to pay for foreign coups – has officially gone woke.
The recruitment video went viral. It outraged the right for portraying America as weak to its adversaries. And it outraged the left, who accused the CIA of dishonestly ‘co-opting’ progressive politics.
In truth, the CIA has been woke for some time – and no one should be surprised by its drift in this direction. The ‘Humans of CIA’ campaign, which highlights the diversity of the agency’s staff, has actually been running since 2019. A year before, Gina Haspel, despite her alleged involvement in ‘extraordinary rendition’, became the first female CIA chief – a move the Trump administration tried to spin as a victory for ‘women’s empowerment’.
It’s not just the CIA, either. The broader defence establishment is now bound up with woke politics. A watershed moment arrived in 2019 when MSNBC could proudly proclaim that the ‘military-industrial complex is now run by women’. As well as Haspel at the CIA, Andrea Thompson at the Pentagon was America’s lead weapons negotiator and in charge of the nuclear stockpile. The five largest arms contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing – were also run by women. In the same year, Raytheon, the world’s largest manufacturer of guided missiles, began its partnership with the Girl Scouts, apparently to ‘close the gender gap in STEM’.
Of course, for US militarism to be truly ‘intersectional’ it has to encompass race and sexuality as well as gender. At the weekend, the US Navy celebrated its first ever all-gay helicopter crew. Dow Chemical, which produced skin-burning napalm for the Vietnam war, has drawn media praise for its gay CEO. ‘How Dow Chemical Got Woke’, was how Bloomberg reported it. Earlier this year, ex-CIA chief John Brennan made headlines when he declared that he was ‘increasingly embarrassed’ to be a white man – perhaps not everyone can be ‘unapologetically themselves’ at Langley, after all.
Why do they bother? Why have the warmongers gone woke? Partly it is a question of image. Of course, just as big companies like to align their corporate missions to Black Lives Matter because it is too gauche to say they are out to make a profit, the CIA and the defence establishment cannot simply say that they are out to dominate other countries or defend US commercial interests.”
Wokeness has spread to the business world as well. Michael Rectenwald offers an outstanding analysis: “Why have the biggest and most profitable American corporations embraced leftist politics, as seen in their woke advertising and social justice activism? Hint: It’s not because they’ve become non-profits and taken up philanthropy.
Judging by the Ted Talks of woke American CEOs, by the woke corporate advertising, and by the public relations campaigns promoting corporate ‘brand activism,’ one might reasonably conclude that the most successful, for-profit corporate giants in America have gone out of the money-making business to become centers of leftist political propaganda. And it’s not only the most woke corporate behemoths that promote leftist political notions. Go to a startup crowdfunding portal and count how many times the word ‘democratizing’ is used to describe the mission of the startups there, or how many startup investments are pitched with the supposedly progressive political outlook of the prospective investor in mind.
