Thinking the Unthinkable about Race and the Military
The headlines shouted a stunning revelation of implied endemic racism: British Royal Air Force No Longer Offering Pilot Jobs to White Men -- Only Women and Ethnic Minorities May Apply, and in the U.S., 86% of Air Force pilots are white men. Here’s why this needs to change. Major General Ed Thomas, head of the Air Force Recruiting Command, has identified the crisis du jour in the Air Force -- not record low recruiting or terrible aircraft readiness. No, it’s the number of white men.
So, General Thomas, what is to be done when the National Basketball Association is 81.1% black? By your logic, shouldn’t the NBA better reflect the national population?
What is really going on here?
British historian and author Neil Oliver recently wrote:
It’s hard to think of the unthinkable, but there comes a time when there’s nothing else for it. People raised to trust the powers that be, assumed as I once did, that the state regardless of its political flavor at any given moment is essentially benevolent and well-meaning, will naturally try and keep that benign sense of benevolence in mind in order to make sense of what is going on around them. People like us, you and me, raised with the understanding that we are free, that we have inalienable rights. Institutions of this country have our best interests at heart, we will tend to tie ourselves in knots rather than contemplate the idea that those authorities will actually be working against us now.
You mean like what happened when leaders in Zimbabwe discovered there were too many white men in their country? Zimbabwe passed laws that stripped white men of their citizenship and ability to own property -- much as the Nazis did when passing the Nuremberg Laws -- and many of the white men of Zimbabwe, primarily farmers and landowners, were hunted down and summarily executed by mobs. While the UK raced to resettle British citizens to the United States and the UK, new government regulations stipulated that all white business owners had to sign over a 51% majority share of their business to black Zimbabweans. What the mobs couldn’t achieve, regulations chased most of the whites out of the country. Could the Zimbabwe model be a roadmap of the left’s plan for America?
Discrimination based on race has been unconstitutional for a long time, but the Left’s racists seem to think they can get around or ignore the law. They cannot directly strip the rights of white people, such as cancelling their U.S. citizenship, but they can and are actively engaged in other means to effectively strip white men of their very being.
Mandatory Critical Race Theory education, the forced embrace of woke culture to replace the warrior culture, allowing those people previously described with sexual disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders to infiltrate the ranks, and pointless white supremacy and white extremism investigations in the Department of Defense serve only one purpose -- not to improve America’s ability to fight our wars but to systematically chase white men from the ranks and make serving the country so untenable that leaving becomes a matter of survival.
Is there an acceptable percentage of white men in Air Force cockpits that racists would be comfortable with? What’s the magic number?
Oliver:
If you have been driving yourself almost demented in an effort to think the best of those in charge, those in senior positions in government in charge of those great institutions of state, those who are running the big corporations but finding it impossible to do so, then the solution to the problem might be to turn your point of view 180 degrees and accept, however unwillingly, that we are being taken for a ride.
To train the absolute best pilots means surviving one of the most challenging programs in government, one with an attrition rate that cannot be believed. The program is designed to find the most capable potential aviators, not worry about managing demographics.
Studies conducted by credentialed government education specialists for decades analyzed years and years’ worth of data and they continually determine, refine, and publish the very best courses of instruction in order to train the very best pilots. The process necessarily rejects the unqualified as well as the “weak swimmers” through a battery of flight aptitude tests and flight physicals to determine if someone is “aeronautically adaptable” -- in other words, can they function in the air and don’t get sick when they leave the ground? The pressure chamber doesn’t care what race you are. The military develops a pilot to be a weapon. Only an idiot would ignore the facts and think the process is racist.
It is not lost on senior and retired military service members that the efforts of the left to leverage race over standards would destroy the armed forces from within. It’s an internal culture war. It is worth remembering that once the very productive Zimbabwe passed laws and tried to exterminate white men, the economy collapsed.
The unthinkable: Is this the goal of the American communists and black racists running our country now? To destroy the U.S. military from within? If the military falls, the country falls.
General Thomas’s agenda is to fix the problem of “there are too many white men in cockpits,” which means the unspoken problem is that the basic process of meeting the high standards that makes great pilots is now going to be deemed racist. Instead of lowering the standards, what needs to be done is to find more black people who can meet the standards.
Most pilots flying fighters (in anyone’s air force) have engineering or baccalaureate of science degrees (not gender or African studies degrees). Whites consistently earn seven times as many STEM (science, technical, engineering, and mathematics) degrees as blacks. Whites were awarded 385,132 STEM degrees and certificates in the United States from 2019-20, while blacks were awarded 55,642. So why isn’t the view that the U.S. must significantly improve STEM education for blacks and minorities?
What they are apparently trying to drive toward is: no longer will each potential African American pilot have to pass a drug test, pass a physical, pass a background investigation, pass academics, pass the simulators, and pass the in-flight check rides. The processes and standards that create the best pilots on the planet will now be overridden in the name of diversity.
We need new leadership at DoD. The current crop is either sympathetic generals of the likes the chairman of the JCS, General Mark “Diversity is our strength” Milley, or the incompetent undeclared racists hiding in uniform using the classical racist subterfuges to purge white men from the ranks, like Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas. They may wear the uniform of our country but they are not on the side of America.
Image: Public Domain Pictures