Gaetz Stumps Lt. General with Gender Terms Air Force Promotes - He's Got No Clue What They Mean
Under President Joe Biden, our military has been turned — at one of the most dangerous points in recent geopolitical memory — into a social experiment, one where “a diverse and inclusive force is a war fighting imperative!”
Those aren’t my words or the words of a conservative pundit, but instead the words on a slide in a presentation given at the U.S. Air Force Academy. It’s not like the Biden administration is hiding this. For instance, consider this opening paragraph of a September 2022 article on the U.S. Department of Defense’s website: “Diversity in the U.S. military and in the militaries of partner nations is a strategic imperative, the commander of U.S. Transportation Command said.”
The evidence for this, Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost said, was a book that “linked the citizen status within the nation and in their military to battlefield performance.”
If Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark, head of the Air Force Academy, indeed read the same tome that Gen. Van Ovost read, he didn’t quite absorb it as well, since he agrees with her sentiment and the party line, but he wasn’t particularly good at answering how that diversity and inclusion was a “war fighting” or “strategic” imperative when the question was posed by Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz during Wednesday testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.
In a viral clip, Gaetz first asked the lieutenant general whether he believed the statement. Indeed he did. Then he asked whether the Mongols, the Vikings, or the forces in modern Ukraine and Russia found that diversity was a “war fighting imperative!”, to quote the slide, exclamation point and all.
Clark demurred on whether the Mongols or Vikings were diverse, instead telling Gaetz that “I’m looking at our country, the most diverse country in the world.”
“But you would … acknowledge that throughout history, including present history, that statement hasn’t borne true in every example. Right?” Gaetz asked.
Clark responded by saying that, in the case of Russia and Ukraine, “those countries have to rely on the full force of their population, to build a war fighting to win our wars, and that’s why it’s important for us to be diverse.”
OK, then, Gaetz said: “So let’s look at the population that actually makes up the fighting force,” Gaetz said. “Now we have more men and women, right? 70-30-ish?” The lieutenant answered that was correct.
“And of the men we have, most of them are not transgender men. Most of them are cisgender men, right?” Gaetz asked. Again, correct. “But yet, at our academies, we put push something called the Brooke Owens Fellowship. Are you familiar with that?” Again, yes.
For the uninitiated, on its website, the Brooke Owens Fellowship describes itself as an organization “designed to serve both as an inspiration and as a career boost to capable young women and other gender minorities who, like Brooke, aspire to explore our sky and stars, to shake up the aerospace industry, and to help their fellow people here on planet Earth. We do this by matching up to forty students per year with purpose-driven, paid internships at leading aerospace companies and organizations and with senior and executive level mentors.”
The Air Force Academy allows cadets to apply for the program.
“And in that fellowship, it specifically says, If you are a cisgender man, this program isn’t for you,” Gaetz continued.
“So you just said that your answer on why we why we do such this, this full hug of these diversity concepts is because it’s all about the fighting force that we draw from, but you’re literally pushing a program in the academies that says, if you’re a cisgender woman, a transgender woman, a non-binary, agender, bi-gender, two-spirit, demigender — what’s demigender?” he stopped to ask.
“Sir, that’s a that’s a term of the people that are eligible for that particular scholarship,” Clark said.
“What’s a demigender person?” Gaetz asked.
“It’s a person who looks at their gender in a different, uh, a different way than I do, sir,” Clark responded.
A few seconds later: “Do you know what demigender really means?”
“I’m not really sure, sir,” Clark answered.
“Right. So do you know what agender means? All one word, not a-space-gender, but agender?” Gaetz asked. No on that one, too. We eventually got to Gaetz’s ultimate point: “So here we are, pushing a fellowship, calling for people that you don’t even know what the words mean. And the number one group of people, the cisgender men are excluded?” Gaetz asked. “Should we be pushing programs that we can’t define, that exclude the largest group of servicemembers? … Why are you allowing your cadets to apply for a program when you cannot define the basic terms of eligibility?”
BREAKING: U.S. Air Force Academy Superintendent Can’t Define Gender Ideology Terms That They Promote on Campuses!
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/v2OAGq0LFl
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) July 19, 2023
Clark wasn’t helpful here, either, simply calling it “an opportunity for us to develop them as warfighters.”
“But you don’t even know what the words mean, how can you use this as a way to develop the warfighters if you don’t know what it means?” Gaetz asked. Again, no helpful answer.
Just in case you were wondering, blog GenderGP defines agender as people who “see themselves as neither a man nor a woman, or both. They’re gender-neutral and often are described as genderfree or genderless.” Meanwhile, according to LGBT-centric outlet Queer in the World, demigender refers to “a gender identity that refers to a partial, but not a full connection to a specific gender identity or the idea of gender. Many demigender individuals also identify as nonbinary.” Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
Apparently, that’s half of the battle Lt. Gen. Clark hasn’t fought — but it’s not exactly his fault. The times, they are a-changin’ inside the Biden administration’s new woke military, and we cannot expect men like the lieutenant general to understand these terms, just to understand that they are the new priority, and by giving preference to them, we somehow confer strength onto our military.
Why? How? It’s not like we can expect this top military official to answer that. After all, when he’s asked who he’s even giving preference to, he gets stumped. Sounds like he needs to read that bunkum book the commander of U.S. Transportation Command was leaning on when she made the same remarks.
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