Stick a Fork in West Point, They’re Done: Wait Until You See the New Degree They’re Offering

@ Revolver News September 26, 2023

Editor's Note: I've not asked nor received permission to publish this piece in full.  If the author of Revolver News objects I will break it down to a link, but that wouldn't do justice to this important piece.  RK 

Well, West Point had an good run, didn’t it? Once a beacon of prestige and elite training, this institution produced some of America’s most outstanding leaders. But times have changed. Today, West Point is just another woke joke, churning out young Marxists with contempt for the very nation they’re supposedly preparing to defend.

West Point has reached the point of no return, particularly after the exposure of their latest “woke” agenda. Believe it or not, but they’re now offering degrees in “Equity and Diversity.” And no, unfortunately, this isn’t a joke.  Here’s the information about the woke course from West Point’s own website:

Diversity & Inclusion Studies Minor
Diversity and Inclusion Studies (DISM) is an interdisciplinary minor administered by the Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership that consists of humanities and social science courses. America is a multicultural polity and demands knowledgeable and pragmatic thinkers who understand the range of human experiences. The Diversity and Inclusion Studies Minor (DISM) exposes cadets to varied perspectives & methodologies for understanding and studying the humanities. By carefully drawing from existing courses in multiple departments, the DISM complements and enhances the core curriculum, academic majors, and several West Point Centers and committees. The DISM helps fulfill the Superintendent’s and Dean’s vision for diversity and inclusion at West Point. Moreover, the DISM at West Point offers cadets a framework for critically and creatively thinking about the broader impact of diversity and inclusion at the individual, organizational, societal, and/or global levels. It also provides our cadets opportunities to pursue diversity and inclusion in intra-, multi- and inter-disciplinary ways.

5-Course Minor

Must take 2 of 3
PL377: Social Inequality
EN352: Power and Difference
SS392: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Must Take 1 of 4
HI391: World Religions
HI461: Sex and Civilizations
HI463: Race, Ethnicity, Nation
HI398: Society & Culture in American History

What a travesty, and how embarrassing for West Point. The left has successfully transformed many of our nation’s college students into pint-sized Marxists, and now they’re seeking to steer our US military officers down the same ideological path.

Campus Reform:

U.S. Military Academy at West Point also offers a Diversity and Inclusion Studies minor, which requires classes in “Power and Difference” and “Social Inequality.”

In response to Campus Reform’s request for comment, West Point clarified that the program was started in 2018 in part to balance faculty and student interest with the “Superintendent’s Strategic Goal of leveraging diversity and fostering inclusion.”

Sadly, West Point’s so-called “clarification” is even worse. But we’ll give them one bit of credit–the left has a real knack for employing buzzwords, don’t they? Phrases like “leveraging diversity” and “fostering inclusion” might sound harmless enough, but in reality, it’s coded language for promoting Marxism, just like “Black Lives Matter.” So, it probably won’t surprise you when we remind you that West Point is being sued for bragging about discriminating against whites.

Western Journal:

On Tuesday, lawyers representing the Students for Fair Admissions sued West Point for alleged race and ethnicity discrimination in admissions decisions, according to Politico. SFFA is the anti-affirmative action group that tanked race-conscious admissions practices at Harvard in a Supreme Court decision.

But the decision that nixed racial admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill determined that because no military academy was party to the suit, the opinion did not include admissions issues at these schools “in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present,” according to Politico.

SFFA didn’t agree with the justices’ logic and argued there is “no justification for using race-based admissions” and, since the practice is now illegal at non-military universities, West Point “is not exempt from the Constitution.”

SFFA contends that West Point is violating the Fifth Amendment with its skewed admission practices. The Fifth Amendment contains an equal-protection principle that binds the federal government.

Regrettably, the radical left has penetrated our sacred institutions—from our churches and educational systems to healthcare, the military, and even West Point. The uncomfortable reality is, this infiltration occurred right under our noses, and we didn’t do anything to try and stop them until it was too late.

A Student Wants to Join West Point. But He’s the Wrong Race

Daniel Greenfield September 28, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

B loog B is a high school student with a 4.2 GPA. One of his grandfathers fought in the Army on D-Day. Three of his family members are currently serving in the military. He would like to attend West Point Academy and continue a proud family tradition of military service, but there’s one problem.

He’s white.

The United States Military Academy is highly selective, but not in the way that it should be.

In 2019, Vice President Mike Pence addressed the graduates, hailing them as “the most diverse class in the history of the United States Military Academy” with the “highest number of Hispanic women graduates”. He told them that, “I couldn’t be more proud to stand before the graduating class of 2019 that includes the highest number of African American women cadets in the history of the United States Military Academy!” That’s been the emphasis at West Point for too long.

Earlier this year, West Point put out a press release boasting of its 38% minority enrollment as part of what a new lawsuit alleges is a practice of achieving its “desired percentages … of blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities” through systemic discrimination in admissions.

As the lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions on the behalf of B, the anonymous student, lays out, “West Point sets benchmarks for the percentage of each class that should be filled by ‘African Americans,’ ‘Hispanics,’ and ‘Asians,’ and it meticulously tracks its compliance with those figures down to a tenth of a percentage point.” The problem is too many white people.

During the Biden administration’s defense of racial discrimination in Harvard’s admissions policies, the federal brief complained that, “white service members are 53% of the active force, but 73% of officers.” West Point’s goal is to match the percentage of officers to the number of enlisted men and so there needs to be only 53% white officers. The white officers must go.

Thomas Jefferson may have said that, “the price of Liberty is eternal vigilance”, but the price of diversity is eternal racial vigilance.

Military systemic racism is perpetually chasing racial quotas that are constantly changing because the national demographics and the racial demographics of a volunteer military are also in flux. And a military brass dedicated to systemic racism is responding with rigid racial quotas.

Students for Fair Admissions, whose previous Supreme Court lawsuit had defeated racial quotas that discriminated against Asian and white students in colleges, launched its lawsuit by showing just how rigidly the number of Asian students admitted to West Point by race really is.

“West Point enrolled 99 Asian Americans in the Class of 2022. The number of Asian Americans enrolled in West Point’s Class of 2023? Precisely 99,” the lawsuit shows. There’s only room for 99 Asians and there are far too many white people and not enough black people at West Point.

“West Point’s benchmark for African Americans in the Class of 2020 was ‘[greater than] 14%,’ even though only 13.1% of U.S. citizens are African American, and Director of Admissions Colonel Deborah McDonald told a West Point diversity conference that a “couple of years ago, every qualified African-American applicant were offered admission into West Point, yet the class composition goal was still lacking.” Meanwhile white students, no matter how qualified, are being kept out because there are too many of them and they stand in the way of ‘diversity’.

Like the rest of the military, West Point has rationalized its systemic racial discrimination by claiming that ‘diversity’ improves recruitment, institutional legitimacy and readiness. The Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit takes a sledgehammer to all of those excuses.

West Point claims that diversity makes Army units “more effective at accomplishing their missions”, but provides no evidence that “military units that choose their members based on race are more successful on the battlefield than units who select their members based on objective measures of tactical competency, regardless of skin color.”

West Point argues that the lack of diversity will “undermine the military’s legitimacy”, but “a significantly higher percentage of Americans expressed confidence in the U.S. military three decades ago than they do today”, and to “the extent that West Point’s mission is to solidify the public’s trust, its race-based admissions policy shoots itself in the foot—especially since 70% of Americans agree that universities should not be allowed to ‘consider race in admissions.’”

West Point contends that the lack of diversity will “harm recruiting efforts. But today, at the apex of West Point’s use of racial preferences, the Army is facing a recruiting crisis that is unprecedented in the modern, all-volunteer era. The Army is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help would-be recruits satisfy basic eligibility requirements and is accepting enlistees who were previously rejected eight different times, but it still cannot meet recruiting goals.”

The woke brass, whether at West Point or anywhere else, have provided no evidence that systemic racism provides any measurable real world benefits. Embracing racial discrimination hasn’t improved the public perception of the military, it destroyed it, and also tanked recruitment.

SFA argues that the woke brass have just rebooted the old military arguments against desegregation using the same vague claims of “morale” and “civilian sentiment” to justify racial policies. President Truman’s military desegregation commission was cheered when it stated that, “to put racial restrictions upon job opportunities” was to “ignore completely the essential factor of individual differences. And insofar as a service refused to a single Negro the technical training and job for which he was qualified, by just so much did the service waste potential skills and impair its own effectiveness. Quite apart from the question of equal opportunity, the Committee did not believe the country or the military services could afford this human wastage.”

Racial military quotas have brought back the same arguments and the same “human wastage”. The same liberals who once cheered the dismantling of military segregation have become the fiercest advocates for it because somehow refusing a job to a black man was wrong, but refusing a job to a white man is the highest form of social justice.

The SFA lawsuit makes the case that what is undermining the military is a lack of merit.

“In-depth surveys and statistical studies of the Army’s personnel crisis—i.e., the rigorous analyses that West Point has failed to offer—show that the military’s emphasis on non-merit factors in admissions and promotions decisions is a leading cause of junior officer attrition. 71% of active duty officers believe the military would retain more talent if opportunities were based solely on merit.”

The military’s racial quotas are premised on the idea that “soldiers view their peers and superiors foremost in terms of race, rather than in terms of their ability or character traits like loyalty, devotion, and selflessness” and that “black soldiers will be more likely to trust a black officer” because “of their skin color, not their trustworthiness” while ignoring the “reams of evidence showing that trust between soldiers is formed through battlefield performance, and that servicemembers in war zones are more concerned with their leaders’ competency than with their skin color.”

There are no atheists in foxholes and no soldier under fire is looking for an evac chopper pilot who shares his skin color. The military was so effective as a desegregated institution because what matters on the battlefield is what you can do, not who you are.

West Point has betrayed its mission and its country through its decision to be “fully committed to affirmative action” rather than to elevating the best of the best. The SFA lawsuit against higher education established that college admissions could not be based on race, and there’s certainly no room for it in government institutions whose purpose is to produce the men and women who will defend our nation. Systemic racism at West Point is a betrayal of America and of ‘B’ and those young men like him who want to serve, but are the wrong race.

There should not be a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’ race at West Point or anywhere in the military.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.Thank you for reading.

 

Memo from an old soldier: Trump can't save America by himself. Clinton can destroy it.

Trump wants to drain the swamp. Clinton is the swamp

By Don Feder

Increasingly, I feel like the old soldier of General Douglas MacArthur's 1962 West Point speech.  In a poetic passage, the man who led American forces in the Pacific during World War II confessed:

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here.  My days of old have vanished – tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. ... Always there are echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.

Toward the end of this month, I'll be 70 years old – about the same age as the contenders.  Trump turned 70 in June.  Hillary will be 70 next October. She graduated from Wellesley College the same year I graduated from Boston University, schools less than 20 miles apart......in what may be the most consequential election in memory, this I know to be true: Trump won't save America.  (The rot is too extensive and entrenched.)  She could very well destroy it.  Trump won't make America great again. (That's too big a job for one man in four to eight years.) But he will begin the process.  Added to eight years of Obama, an unhealthy dose of Hillary could spell the end of the Republic.......He wants to drain the swamp.  She is the swamp........More