The DOD “guidance” memo was blunt:
”Identity Months Dead at DOD.”
Besides banning Black History Month observances in the military, Hegseth/Trump is now pressing their anti-DEI extermination mission by purging the shelves of Defense Department schools, which 67, 000 elementary & secondary students attend at 160 locations worldwide. (One of them was me, a long time ago.) The goal is, in the words of a presidential executive order (EO): “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”
But even so, however much they despise DEI, there remains plenty of cultural and racial, er “variety” in the military —and among the 67,000 K-12 students, who may live on military bases, but are not in the military themselves. Hegseth is aggressively applying the EO as part of his “American Crusade”) and the targets also include civilian public schools; the DOD system is first because the feds have complete control.
Hegseth recently repeated to a Pentagon audience one of his favorite slogans, which peppers his books: “I think the single, dumbest phrase in military history is, ‘Our diversity is our strength,’” Hegseth said. “I think our strength is our unity.”
He added that people should be treated equally regardless of their background, upbringing, gender or race, and judged based on their merit and commitment to the team and its mission. “That’s how it has been. That’s how it will be,” Hegseth said. “Any inference otherwise is meant to divide or create complications that otherwise should not and do not exist.”
This, of course is a mandate for indoctrination of another sort, into a worldview from which numerous features (and people) Hegseth and his boss dislike and want to disappear have been banished or erased. Library and classroom bookshelves are only a beginning, but they are tell-tale signals.
What titles are involved? Here are five, named from a longer list in news reports:
– Freckleface Strawberry, by Julianne Moore
– No Truth Without Ruth, Bio of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
– The Fighting Infantryman, Bio of a trans Union soldier in & after the Civil War
– A Nation of Immigrants, by John F. Kennedy
– Becoming Nicole, Autobiography of a trans woman
A DOD spokesperson said that “books potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” as defined in Trump’s executive orders will be relocated to a book collection for staff to be evaluated. “During this period,” he said, “access will be limited to professional staff.”
There was no indication how long the review period might be.
The main criterion for the review, set forth in the Trump EO was: “‘discriminatory equity ideology’, defined as “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.”
Children’s books were not the only materials removed for review. The Washington Post reported that “Among the newly restricted material is a book chapter in a psychology course for advanced-placement high school students about gender and sexuality, a lesson for fifth-graders about how immigration affects the United States,. . . . The prohibited list also includes a bundle of instructional materials created for sixth-graders for Black History Month.”
The removals were not unchallenged. Twice last week in Hesgeth’s first visit to U. S. bases in Europe there were protests: a small but vocal crowd booed him and the removals at the army’s European headquarters, and more than 50 students staged a walkout at a base middle school in Stuttgart.