Slate’s Fred Kaplan adds a coda to the mic Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Miley dropped on Florida Reps. Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz last week over understanding social forces in the country they defend.
Kaplan notes the right-wing hysteria over critical race theory and recalls that West Point has had a social science department since the beginning of the Cold War. Long before “woke” became a slur on the right, Maj. Isaiah Wilson taught a course on gender, class, and sexuality (1999). “The professor teaching the course now, a civilian named Rachel Yon,” Kaplan writes, “took it over from Wilson in 2012—again, predating the kerfuffle over wokeness and CRT.” That is, she was “not a fashionable hire.”
The military nonetheless continues to be a place where gender and race issues persist, including with the disturbing presence of white-supremacist militia members in the ranks.
Milley was burned once by Trumpism when he accompanied Donald Trump out to Lafayette Square last summer immdiately after the police used tear-gas to clear it for Trump’s bible-holding photo-od. Milley “soon apologized for his presence and gradually began moving away from Trump’s orbit, taking his duties as an independent military adviser more properly.” Even more reason he has less tolerance now for political attacks from Trumpist congressmen.
On that, Kaplan writes:
That brings us to Secretary Austin and to Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were both slammed by congressional Republicans at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week. Florida Reps. Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz, the latter a former Army Green Beret, led the charge, citing cadets and their parents who were disturbed by the stand-down to discuss extremism and the divisiveness of classes on race.
“Thanks for your anecdotal input,” Austin replied. “I have gotten 10 times that amount of input, 50 times that amount of input, on the other side that has said, ‘Hey, we’re glad to have had the ability to have a conversation with ourselves and with our leadership.’”
Milley then gave his now-viral rebuttal:
Neither Austin nor Milley care to deal with this political crap, says Kaplan:
Both have commanded troops in battle. (Austin is a retired four-star Army general.) Milley graduated from Princeton and holds an M.A. in international relations from Columbia, but, a retired officer who knows him told me, “he likes to portray himself as a guy who got to Princeton by being a hockey player and proceeded to be part of the bottom half of the class that helped the top half achieve what they did.” Still, they see that race and gender are not merely social issues but national-security issues and that dealing with these thorny problems is part of their jobs.
The Princeton quip gave me a chuckle. It’s even more reason that Milley showed little patience with an unprincipled frat boy like Gaetz.
But that’s all it took for flag-wrapped pseudo-patriots to call for defunding the military they supported unreservedly before joining the Trump cult. I keep saying, their commitment to this country is a mile wide and an inch deep. They are better at boasting about principles than sticking to them.