A Racist Training Program for the U.S. Navy
Forget fighting China, confess your white privilege.
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
As he assumed the office of Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday announced that he wanted to change the Navy. While the title of his remarks in the video you see here below was: “One Team, One Navy,” its actual message was racist and divisive. His bottom line: only “conversations” about race would help. The “conversations” he referred to were in fact a lecture from America’s most popular and fact-challenged racist du jour, Ibram X. Kendi.
The “conversation” included “shared” videos of naval personnel claiming that America was racist and that they were angry. “Being African-American in America is not fun,” an aviation technician claimed, especially no doubt for a two-term African-American president who pocketed $100 million for the skillful exploitation of his public office.
There was no word on whether being African in Somalia, Sudan, and Nigeria is any more “fun” than being black in America or whether being a Somalian hater of Jews and America might put you on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and get you protected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the leadership of the Democrat Party.
In keeping with Gilday’s efforts to divide the Navy by race, an official Navy video endorsed the Marxist organization Black Lives Matter and denounced police for the death of drug-dealer-accomplice Breonna Taylor, who was shot resisting arrest when her boyfriend triggered a hailstorm of bullets after shooting and wounding a police officer doing his job. Bottom line of the video: naval recruits and officers need to hate their “white supremacist” country and question their service.
In the video, a lieutenant commander claimed that he had experienced “systemic racism” and “implicit bias” – note, not actual bias. A white corpsman urged that “we can stand up for change” and then, mouthing the standard Marxist line, declared that “tomorrow’s Navy will finally stand on the right side of history when we realize that black lives matter.”
“I have become very aware of my privilege as a white person,” a female musician confessed. Then she claimed that “this country has a history of systemic racism.” [FACT: systemic racism was outlawed nearly 60 years ago by the Civil Rights Act]. She called for creating a “country that is more equitable and just.” How this was to be accomplished by repeating racist tropes about white people – guilty because of their skin color — she didn’t bother to explain.
The video closed with Gilday vowing to eliminate “systemic racism” with a new task force.
This dangerous farce wasn’t taking place under the Obama or Biden administrations. No one from above was forcing Gilday to undermine national security or attack the foundations of this country. The year was 2020 and the Chief of Naval Operations was doing it entirely of his own accord.
Gilday, a naval mediocrity, got to his position at the top of the Navy leadership because a new political environment made better men fearful of taking it.
Normally, it’s not a job for vice admirals. The virtually unprecedented promotion happened after President Trump’s original nominee, Admiral Bill Moran, was kneecapped by a politically-motivated, phony scandal.
Moran, a talented leader, was pushed out and forced to retire because he had emailed a former staff officer who had been accused of misbehaving at a Christmas party back in 2016.
The Pentagon probe pushed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand ended Moran’s career.
Navy Secretary Richard Spencer claimed that Moran maintaining a friendship with a former officer who had misbehaved, “caused me to call his judgment into question” and suggested it was at odds with treating “every person with dignity and respect.”
Moran’s purge wasn’t isolated. Democrat politicians, the media, and Pentagon bureaucrats had made a point of coming after virtually any Trump nominee. Their agenda was to cripple the administration and cancel its America First policies. These tactics endangered national security and weakened the military, and carried on the political agendas of the Obama-Biden administration. Under this onslaught, few leaders wanted to take a top job because they risked being destroyed on the thinnest pretext.
Navy Secretary Richard Spencer would later be fired over the witch-hunt against Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, after which he denounced President Trump and endorsed Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. Spencer had already shown that he wouldn’t stand behind a Chief of Naval Operations under leftist attack. So Gilday, a vice admiral, was suddenly given a job no one qualified wanted.
This was bad news for the Navy and for America’s security.
Gilday was nominated because he was “progressive” enough or could play that part. He would not be a candidate for a witch-hunt. While Admiral Moran had stood up for his people, Gilday began pushing racial campaigns before Biden occupied the White House.
In the summer of 2020, Gilday began mandating his “conversations” about race, which insisted that the Navy was racist. The infamous video was one of the most public of these “conversations.”
Rear Admiral Alvin Holsey, one of the few black admirals, headed Task Force One Navy whose report swapped out traditional naval tradition for fighting “racism, sexism, ableism and other structural and interpersonal biases.” TF1N members vowed to advocate for “all lived experiences and intersectional identities of every sailor.”
Officers were told that it was their job to “advocate for change.”
The new “One Navy” was a college campus whose focus wasn’t fending off China, but recruiting activists for leftist causes. Its guidelines drew heavily on “white privilege” materials, warning officers to “actively listen and do not be defensive.” In other words, if you criticize the racist propaganda we offer that in itself proves you’re a racist.
The report also proposed fighting “systemic racism” by removing “problematic” language. It dismantled uniform and grooming standards. Even the term “good taste” was banned.
But there were more ominous proposals like including bias awareness training or so-called “implicit bias” (and what might that be?) which would force Navy leadership into critical race theory sessions.
Gilday was overseeing the transformation of the Navy into a leftist indoctrination machine.
The same month that the report was released, Gilday had a whole new list of reading materials for the fleet. While Gilday has since tried to portray the Professional Reading Program as an optional hobby, it’s understood that these books convey the thinking of the brass. Reading and absorbing their concepts makes officers a good fit for the culture and helps their careers.
While these books had been generally about the military with a focus on leadership, the list sharply diverged with The New Jim Crow which claimed preposterously that America is based on a “racial caste” system (tell that to Barack and Michelle Obama), and Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Anti-Racist.
The leftist texts not only violated the military’s non-partisan role in protecting a diverse democratic society, they were racist texts that divided people by color and undermined the Navy’s mission and morale.
Kendi’s anti-racism message is that you either agree with his political “solutions” — or you’re a racist.
“There is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas,” he preaches. The title of this text Gilday is recommending is a thesis that you’re either a left-wing activist or a racist. Either you support and will work to achieve Kendi’s leftist political objectives or you’re a bigot.
According to Kendi, discrimination can be a good thing. “If discrimination is creating equity [like giving benefits to people who are not white], then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity [for anyone but white people], then it is racist.”
To Kendi everything is transmuted into racism. Even the weather. “Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy,” he argues, “since the predominantly non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north.” But of course, the chief global polluters, China, Pakistan, and India, are nations “of color” who have refused to change their climate policies, while the biggest pusher of climate change alarmism is the long-time white racist now-president of the “white supremacist” United States.
Kendi’s is not your garden variety racism. It’s argued on the same level as the sermons of the long-defeated Ku Klux Klan – in reverse. In college, Kendi wrote that “Europeans are simply a different breed of human” who are “facing extinction” because of their “recessive genes” and are trying to “level the playing field with the AIDS virus.” His presentation since then has grown slicker without varying from the same premise that white people are innately racist and the aggressors in an endless struggle to suppress black people.
This racist worldview, promoted by Gilday and the Democrat leadership, and funded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is fundamentally no different from Louis Farrakhan’s blue-eyed-devil explanation of everything that’s wrong with Western history and its civilization. Forget the fact that there is still black slavery in Africa and brown slavery in China, and that America and the British Empire led the world in freeing black slaves.
Kendi sees everything through the lens of racial hatred. He even denounced Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a “white colonizer” because she adopted two Haitian children. This is the Navy’s new race guide.
The oath of enlistment for naval recruits pledges them to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and its elected officials. But its race guru Ibram Kendi wants to replace all of that with a Department of Anti-racism (DOA) that would have total authority over all “local, state and federal public policies” and given “disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”
Forget the oath of enlistment; this attack on the Constitution is what Chief of Naval Operations Gilday has twisted the Navy into endorsing.
Rep. Jim Banks, a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan, asked Gilday at a hearing about his endorsement for Kendi’s racist views. Instead of condemning Kendi’s racist idea that white people aren’t human and created AIDS to kill black people, Gilday argued that these were “cherry-picked quotes” and went on defending the legitimacy of pushing Kendi’s noxious agendas.
“What this is really about is trying to paint the United States military, and in this case, the United States Navy as weak, as woke,” Gilday complained. “We are not weak.”
Sorry but the Navy is on a path to becoming as weak as it is woke.
If Gilday weren’t weak, he wouldn’t be occupying his current position over the heads of more qualified admirals. And if those admirals had shown a willingness to stand up to the purgers, then the entire Navy wouldn’t be subjected to woke witch-hunts and what the Chinese Communists refer to as “struggle sessions.”
Even before the Navy confronts Communist China or Jihadist Iran, it’s under attack from their anti-American leftist allies in this country. The enemy is inside the military and waging psychological war on its own country.
Gilday, like the rest of the woke military leaders, is a pathetic figure who has dispensed with his oath of allegiance and has sworn a woke oath to anti-white race theory. He has pledged his service to racist ideas, like those of Ibram X. Kendi, who will forever despise him on account of his skin color.
And as a reward for his treason, he hopes to be left alone long enough to retire as a lobbyist.