Maybe it’s a sign we need to MAGA — Make the Army Great Again — but a diversity-oriented handout issued by that military branch actually listed President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan as a possible sign of white supremacist tendencies.
The Army said in a statement last Wednesday that the July 6 material, provided to troops and contractors at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, was issued in error and that it’s investigating the matter. Of course, this doesn’t explain why such a handout was created in the first place.
As Military.com reports:
The material was meant to promote meetings at Redstone Arsenal as part of the Army’s “Project Inclusion,” an effort by Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Joseph McConville “to improve diversity, equity and inclusion across the force and build cohesive teams.”
Project Inclusion involved listening sessions at bases worldwide for troops and civilians on issues such as racial disparities and the Army’s move in August to remove photos from officers’ promotion boards, according to the service.
The promotional material, sent in emails, included an illustration of a pyramid of phrases labeled “Things To Think About” [shown below].
A U.S. Army employee on Monday sent an email invite to likely thousands of military and civilian members for a U.S. Army ‘Operation Inclusion’ listening tour, which included a graphic that said saying “MAGA” is evidence of white supremacy. The Army says it was “sent in error.” pic.twitter.com/NUvm0lMVMh
— Kristina Wong ?? (@kristina_wong) July 9, 2020
And think about this: PJ Media adds, “‘Make America Great Again,’ ‘Eurocentric Education,’ ‘not challenging racist jokes,’ and ‘Celebration of Columbus Day’ are among the many phrases and actions considered ‘covert white supremacy,’ according to the handout.”
Of course, there was no mention of how demonizing Columbus Day could be insensitive and offensive (a microaggression? A macroaggression?) to Italian-descent Americans. Hey, in the diversity game, winners and losers must be chosen.
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And big losers are virtue, Truth, and nationhood. Just consider, Military.com tells us, that the handout also lists as examples of “covert white supremacy,” “‘English-Only Initiatives;’ ‘Bootstrap Theory;’ ‘All Lives Matter;’ and such sayings as, ‘Don’t Blame Me. I Never Owned Slaves.’”
Unsurprisingly, though, the Army now says, don’t blame us, we never own our misdeeds. For, in “its statement, the Army did not address how the July 6 handout was put together, but said that it included two unapproved pages and was quickly recalled,” Military.com further relates.
In fact, there might be no attention paid to this at all were it not for “a complaint from Republican Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama, whose district includes Redstone,” PJ Media also informs. “Brooks believes the handout violates the Hatch Act, which prevents the military from engaging in partisan politics,” the site continues. “The congressman sent a letter to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, copied to Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and others.”
Unfortunately, the handout’s distribution is neither an isolated incident nor even just part of a series of blunders. Rather, it reflects a cultural revolution that leaves nothing untarnished.
Consider: In “2013, a US Army training instructor lumped Evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the Church of Latter Day Saints with Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Ku Klux Klan, and Nation of Islam as examples of religious extremism,” relates American Greatness.
Providing more examples of “the dangerous wokesterism infiltrating the military,” commentator Monica Showalter mentions “the military’s resistance to ending transgender soldiers, who require significant medical care and are disruptive to military order[;] … the naval commander who took his COVID worries aboard a ship at sea to the press instead of up his chain of command, informing the enemy; the coddling of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who committed quite a few irregularities at the National Security Council and then attempted to unseat President Trump with the help of the partisan Democrats; and the military’s resistance to putting down civil unrest engulfing America’s cities, raising questions about what it was good for if it couldn’t bring itself to put a stop to a bona fide internal threat. Protecting Afghanis?”
So to use a term and a concept currently popular with the “enlightened,” the diversity handout is part of a “systemic” problem requiring “fundamental change.” It’s not the disease — it’s a symptom of the disease.
Just consider the greater symptom of which it was born: the aforementioned Project Inclusion. “The strength of the Army comes from its diversity,” it states on its webpage. “Developing and maintaining qualified and demographically diverse leadership is critical for mission effectiveness and is essential to national security.”
This is pure, unadulterated hogwash, but reflective of our time’s fallacy and falsehood-born Diversity Dogma. The Army’s strength would actually lie in its technological superiority, discipline, wise leadership, and, to the point here, unity.
Diversity — and especially diversity programs, which emphasize differences — actually disrupt unity. In fact, the term “diversity” is derived from older words meaning things such as “difference,” “separateness,” “contrariety, contradiction, disagreement,” “conflict, strife,” and even “wickedness, perversity,” informs the Online Etymology Dictionary.
Of course, none of these meanings are intended today by the social engineers spouting the term, but you wouldn’t know it from studies indicating that diversity programs do more harm than good. Not only don’t they lead to more “diversity” (not positive by definition, anyway), but they actually increase anger toward the groups for which they demand tolerance.
This is just common sense. If you forced a child to sit and be lectured — perhaps using the threat of punishment to ensure compliance (as diversity programs sometimes do) — about why he should like Johnny, why he should be careful not to say anything offensive to Johnny, why some things he innocently utters are wrong and could bother Johnny, and why he must alter his habits to accommodate Johnny, how would he feel about Johnny?
Getting the message that Johnny is the favorite, it would evoke jealousy and resentment. And you shouldn’t be surprised if there’s a fight in the schoolyard at day’s end.
Uniting people requires focusing on what they can truly have in common, universals such as Truth and virtues, those “good moral habits.” But if you want to divide people — whether children or adults, a small group or a whole nation — emphasizing diversity is precisely the way to go.
Image: James McNellis/Wikimedia Commons
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
