No, the Military Isn't "Anti-White"
Or, "on the perils of forgetting to cancel a subscription" ...
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
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In order to sufficiently research an older post analyzing the disturbing thoughts of one Rod Dreher, I had no choice but to pay for a subscription to his blog. I had meant to cancel it once I finished, but forgot. I was unpleasantly reminded of this recently, when I took a look at the Substack app for the first time in a while. A single glance at my feed was enough to make me groan: I learned that not only had I inadvertently been contributing $5 per month to Rod’s crusade, but worse, that Rod is now under the impression that the US Military has been waging a campaign of racist discrimination against…Caucasians.
Good God, not this again.
I’ve seen and heard versions of this complaint made by some extremely immature and insecure people, but I’ve never encountered it in writing. And I’ve never seen it so explicitly put. Rod sincerely believes that the armed forces of the United States genuinely hate white people. I’m not misrepresenting his views – he literally says this. He insists that “white potential recruits have looked at the evidence and concluded that the Pentagon hates people like them and their families.” [emphasis mine] He is adamant that the military “considers [whites] to be second-class, owing to the color of their skin.” He whines that “diversocrats” have turned the military “into a racial spoils system, like everywhere else.” “Why would any young white person seek to serve when he stands to face discrimination within the ranks,” Rod asks? “When he might be denied a promotion because he is not the correct race? When his commanding officer might have been promoted not because of his ability to lead, but because he fit a quota?”
How, you may wonder, has Rod come to all these extravagant conclusions? By reading a single article at military.com. And he can’t have done more than skim it, because, you will be shocked to learn, military.com does not say that the US military is discriminating against whites. It says that there’s an unexplained drop in white recruitment, in the US Army alone – that’s all! Once again, Rod is allowing his overactive imagination, fueled by relentless racial paranoia, to run wild. Military.com is merely his justification.
The piece’s title, “Army Sees Sharp Decline in White Recruits,” is self-explanatory, and it takes care to explain, multiple times, that no one knows why white recruitment is down. “Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist who studies demographics at the [right-wing] American Enterprise Institute,” is explicit that “Like with any other big historic change, it's kind of hard to attribute to a single magic bullet.” [emphasis mine] According to an unnamed Army official interviewed for the piece, “What we're seeing is a reflection of society; what we know less of is what is driving all of these things.” They conclude, “There is no widely accepted cause.” [emphasis mine]
The piece suggests that the obesity epidemic, the opioid epidemic, or the decline of men generally from the work force, might be causes, but cautions that these are basically just guesses. Another possibility is that white recruits are attending college less, and as such, the G.I. Bill is less relevant for them: “if college is becoming less relevant to white males, that pitch for service could become less enticing moving forward.” Whatever the reason – or reasons – the piece’s conclusion is clear: “the drop in white recruitment has baffled Army staff and isn't easily explained by any one particular factor, and no parallel demographic trends in the civilian sector are perfect comparisons.”
To Rod, however, the cause is obvious – the military hates whites, and is actively discriminating against them. While ridiculous, this conclusion does at least bear some relation to one of the possible causes noted in the piece – ironically, that white recruitment is low because older, white veterans have been badmouthing the military because it has gotten more diverse:
Another Army official pointed to partisan attacks from conservative lawmakers and media, which has an overwhelmingly white audience. Those groups have used the military as a partisan cudgel against the Biden administration, lambasting the services for being “woke,” or so preoccupied with liberal values that they have abandoned their warfighting priorities. In most cases, those attacks have zeroed in on the services being more inclusive for women, service members from racial minority groups and LGBTQ+ troops.
“No, the young applicants don't care about this stuff. But the older people in their life do who have a lot of influence ... parents, coaches, pastors,” one Army official told Military.com. “There's a level of prestige in parts of conservative America with service that has degraded. Now, you can say you don't want to join, for whatever reason, or bad-mouth the service without any cultural guilt associated for the first time in those areas.”
Rod is furious with military.com for speculating that older white veterans discouraging their children from enlisting because of DEI may have caused the drop in recruitment:
Yes, of course: this result cannot possibly be because white potential recruits see that the military has adopted policies that actively or passively discriminate against them, because they are white, and decide that they have no interest in putting their lives on the line for a military that considers them to be second-class, owing to the color of their skin. No, the real problem, according to “some Army planners,” are “partisans” who point this out.
But shortly thereafter, incredibly, Rod informs us that he has heard from countless older white veterans that they have discouraged their children from enlisting because of DEI:
I have told you readers about the many anecdotes I’ve received over the past few years from both active-duty and recently retired service personnel, including officers, who say they actively discourage their family members from joining the service. Why? Because of this kind of thing. They correctly see the DEI ideology embraced by military leadership as bigotry, and they don’t want to see their kids subjected to it.
I could not have written something this shoddy if I tried. It amazes me that this man is considered a deep thinker. I do not understand how one cannot see contradictions like this. Furthermore, I do not see how one can possibly read the military.com piece and conclude from it that “the military hates white people and their families.” Not a single shred of evidence to that effect appears in the article. If whites are no longer joining the service because they’ve been told not to by their DEI-averse elders, then, by definition, there is no discrimination against white people, they’re just choosing not to enlist!
On the other hand, I can understand how a deeply insecure, easily frightened old white man from the South with reactionary politics, raised by a former member of the KKK (seriously), might think this. If you’ve been conditioned to panic at the mere possibility of people who don’t look like you becoming marginally more prominent in institutions that you’ve long subconsciously considered to be “yours,” then it makes sense that you’d be terrified, as Rod clearly is. I hate myself for typing this sentence, because it's such a cliché, but the saying, “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” applies here.
I am obviously in favor of criticizing the military. I have done so repeatedly, and will continue to do so. Which is why I can’t stand to see criticisms of it coming from people who (a) are genuine bigots, and (b) clearly don’t understand the institution in the first place. To the latter point, Rod, who is sometimes erroneously considered something of an “anti-war conservative,” claims in this same rant that
US foreign and defense policy has been directed not towards defending America and her legitimate interests, but in large part towards “spreading democracy and human rights,” meaning, trying to compel foreigners to become proper American liberals, whether they want to or not. It started with George W. Bush’s crusading for liberal democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan; it continued with Barack Obama elevating LGBT advocacy to a foreign policy priority.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. That’s not what foreign policy has been about, ever. Bush did not invade Iraq to spread “democracy.” There was no democracy in the United States for him to spread. This was an excuse, almost exclusively invoked after the lies about WMD completely fell apart and had to be replaced with something else. Iraq was invaded for the oil, and to replace Iran (which the US “lost” as an imperial outpost in 1979) as a geopolitical foothold for the US in the region. Similarly, Obama did not “elevate LGBT advocacy to a foreign policy priority,” whatever the hell that means. He did, however, elevate drone strikes on civilians, covert operations raids in countries the United States had no business being in, and support for Saudi Arabia (not exactly a pro-LGBT outfit) as foreign policy priorities.
In the middle of his hysterical shrieks about nonexistent discrimination, Rod further insists that “if the Chinese government wanted to destabilize and demoralize the United States, they could hardly have done better than to have converted the Pentagon brass into apostles of DEI.” Meanwhile, over in reality, the “Pentagon brass” are busy surrounding China with nuclear warheads, quadrupling the number of troops stationed in Taiwan, packing the South China Sea with warships, and selling nuclear submarines to China’s neighbors so that they can more effectively “contain” it. Evidently these “apostles of DEI” haven’t let their newfound faith interfere with their military objectives.
Of course, claiming that military top brass (overwhelmingly white and male) have become enamored of DEI is absurd. Consider this famous (in military circles) short clip of the Commandant and the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps imploring servicemembers to take seriously the “stand down” then in effect across the armed forces on extremism in the ranks, specifically referring to the Marine Corps’ notorious problem with neo-Nazis and white supremacy. It’s not possible to watch this and believe that these are “diversocrats” who love DEI:
Task and Purpose, among many others, was quick to note their pained expressions, joking that they’d been taken hostage (“blink three times if you’re ok”) and that the video “appears so forced that it has some wondering whether they are in need of a special operations rescue mission.”
There are no “apostles” of DEI here. And anyone who has spent any time with military leadership, enlisted or otherwise, will know that this is true across the board. At the time this “stand-down” occurred, I was on a ship in the South China Sea, and I assure you the general attitude (at least among the officers) was about the same that you see in the video.
Look, the US military exists for a single purpose – to ensure that American capital has access to markets, raw materials, and cheap labor, and that political/economic ideologies which challenge or obstruct that access are not adopted by foreign governments, especially the ones sitting on all the resources. Accomplishing this requires bloodshed, as evidenced by the fact that the military’s raison d’etre throughout my lifetime has been to bomb, maim, kill, and displace black and brown people in Africa and the Middle East, along with Southeast Asians in an earlier era. (This does not mean, as is sometimes incorrectly suggested, that the military never kills white people – you will notice, for instance, that the nation of Yugoslavia no longer appears on maps)
DEI is entirely irrelevant to all this. The military embraces it because they want to put a multicultural, progressive gloss on this decidedly not-very-progressive project in order to retain the admiration of the liberal-leaning public (side effects include comically over-the-top anger coming from the right). In the same vein, Goldman Sachs will make noise about diversifying its board of directors - not because this is viewed as an inherent good, but because they think it will lead to “stronger financial performance.” But the institution will never do anything to help the (disproportionately nonwhite) people whose lives were ruined by its actions leading up to 2008. Similarly, Amazon will “amplify black voices,” which is a good thing as far as it goes, but they certainly won’t amplify them if they happen to be clamoring for the right to a union, safer work conditions, or higher pay.
Multicultural rhetoric and imagery like this is just lipstick on a pig, and the military is no different. Now, there’s a great critique waiting to be written regarding the bitter irony of an imperialist enterprise placing such an emphasis on DEI. But Rod is not nearly insightful enough to understand such nuance, much less write about it.
This is because he is a gullible, shrill racist who does not engage in reflection before he writes, and also because he’s simply one of the least trustworthy commentators generally. I started “going down the rabbit hole” again while writing this, but had to force myself to stop. His whole blog is like a car wreck that you can’t look away from. Literally nothing the man says can be trusted. He claims, for instance, that the Google DEI chief, a black woman, was “caught” encouraging people to judge others based on the color of their skin, supposedly another example of anti-white racism. Outrageous! But if you proceed to watch the less-than-60-second clip Rod links to as evidence for this assertion, you learn that she was actually critiquing the cringey phrase (and its underlying mindset) “I don’t see race,” which has long elicited well-deserved eye rolls. So, Rod is either criminally lazy or outright lying. Or perhaps he is neither, and genuinely thinks that such harmless observations are tantamount to anti-white discrimination. Whatever the case may be, this is a man who is deeply in need of some therapy – and I never suggest that.
People like Rod who spend countless hours agonizing over “identity politics” consistently fail to see that the most common form of identity politics is in fact white identity politics, and that they themselves are its chief practitioners. The fear that nonwhite people are (a) running the military and (b) acting with discrimination towards white servicemembers is a kind of funhouse mirror version of a common talking point about the armed forces, long used to bolster their reputation. It goes like this: “the military is the only institution in American life where black guys boss around white guys.” This cliché is normally invoked to depict the military as more progressive than other aspects of American society. Rod, however, hears about it and starts having palpitations because he thinks it means that the military is implementing a regime of reverse-Jim Crow.
But here’s the thing both camps don’t understand – the talking point is mostly bogus. Former Marine Lyle Jeremy Rubin (a straight white male, so Rod can rest assured that he’s a valid source) wrote in his blistering memoir of the Corps, Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body, that “Military apologists love to talk up the fact that boot camp and the Corps in general encourage an environment where enlisted blacks and Latinos get to smoke poor, working-class, middle-income, and sometimes even upper-crust whites all day.” Indeed, he recounts his own black Drill Sergeant, S.T. Franklin, doing just this. But he continues:
What’s rarely acknowledged, however, was that Franklin’s boss, Staff Sergeant F.P. Slaughter, was white, and Slaughter’s boss, Gunnery Sergeant M.J. Brackenbury, was white, and Brackenbury’s boss, First Lieutenant A.R. Polk, was white, and Polk’s boss, Major D.N. Norman, was white, and Norman’s boss, Lieutenant Colonel H.E. Fisher, was white, and Fisher’s boss, Colonel Paul B. O’Connor, was white, and O’Connor’s boss, Brigadier General Ryan H. Archambault, was white, and so on all the way up to then Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and then President George W. Bush. And it’s been that way, more or less, for the entire history of the United States.1
This demographic reality, along with the well-known racism evident in ordinary American life and the nature of the military project itself, makes it extraordinarily far-fetched that anti-white sentiment is festering in the ranks. If folks like Rod would take the obligatory step of listening to military personnel who don’t look or think like them, they might learn this.
Consider Jonathan W. Hutto. After graduating from Howard University in 2003, Hutto enlisted in the Navy, becoming a photographer’s mate. In his essay “A Sailor’s Story,” he describes what happened next. “I found that despite the military’s supposed inclusivity today, it offers no escape from racism and white nationalism. And this racism is directly connected to the acts of aggression and even war crimes committed by the US military overseas.” Hutto details his many experiences with racism in the ranks, both overt – (one colleague in the photo lab aboard USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT “praised Adolph Hitler, performed Nazi salutes, and openly referred to Dr. Martin Luther King as a ‘coon’”) as well as the more subtle variety. He was particularly disheartened by “the internalized oppression displayed by Black sailors around [him],” concluding that such an attitude “is all but a requirement for African Americans who want to ascend the Navy’s ranks.”2
The attitudes Hutto encountered become worse in the military the more that violence is involved in the occupation (and Rod’s absurd idea about pervasive anti-white discrimination becomes even less compelling). Consider the Marines, probably the branch most affected by fanaticism. As Rubin writes, his class at Parris Island would often laugh at things which he later recognized “weren’t funny at all.” Specifically, “During pool training, the black recruits would end up on the remedial side while white recruits smirked with a look of ‘that’s funny.’” But as Rubin is quick to point out, “A history of segregated pools isn’t funny, and neither is the failure to connect cause with effect. Denial of such historical continuity is far from funny.”3 I can’t say that I’ve had this specific experience, since virtually everyone in my NROTC unit was white, but I have indeed heard former enlisted Marines joke about exactly this phenomenon, indicating that what Rubin recounts is hardly uncommon.
Now look at the special forces, worshipped by liberals and conservatives alike as the best of the best. Author David Philipps notes that “In the SEAL Teams, Trump was a hero. The Teams were overwhelmingly white and entirely male, and were predisposed to Republicans. Fox News was their default news source.” Readers will surely remember the case of Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL whose behavior became so egregious that his fellow SEALs reported him for war crimes – which itself is incredible, since there’s a major culture of silence among SEALs that has historically prevented this from happening in the past.4 According to Philipps, Gallagher “was openly homophobic” and “persistently made racist comments.” While in San Diego at the same time as his former platoon chief, Gallagher texted him about going to lunch. The chief replied that he couldn’t attend. “[T]here was a demonstration” that day “over the police killing of a mentally ill Black man,” and the chief ominously said that he’d “be busy at the riots.” Gallagher replied, “Run those niggers over.”5 It was with this demeanor that Gallagher started murdering Iraqi children while on deployment – just the tip of the iceberg, the most hideous in a string of awful actions that his teammates could no longer stomach.6
Eddie Gallagher, of course, is not the average servicemember. He’s not even the average SEAL, although he may not be too far off. In a private Facebook page for SEALs which Philipps was able to access, no one “seemed to care that [Gallagher] had targeted civilians. They were just mad that guys in [Gallagher’s Platoon] had said anything about it.” Elsewhere, Philipps writes that “in the longer memories of the SEAL Teams [Gallagher] was no anomaly. He was a SEAL raised by other SEALs. His actions reflected a learned behavior passed down from the men who had come before him.” The “dark truth,” Philipps concludes, was that Gallagher “was not an outlier of the SEALs but a product.”7 The SEALs never learned “how to create a culture that could protect against killing’s corrosive effects.” To some extent, I would argue, neither has the military at large.
This is partly because the kind of person the military attracts is already inclined to this sort of behavior – peace-and-love types tend not to enlist. Even when they do, they don’t gravitate toward combat roles. But there’s another reason. It turns out that running around the world killing black and brown people does not produce a racially enlightened, tolerant culture. And the bureaucracy which exists to support such activities – i.e., the rest of the military – is naturally going to experience the downstream effects of this ethos. DEI might be able to mitigate this a bit in, say, an office setting, where many military personnel find themselves, and where no one is required to routinely demonize or murder foreigners. But at best this is treating the symptoms, whereas what’s needed is a look at the root causes, as Hutto alluded to.
The attitude that prevails among many (though certainly not all) white men, and more than a few women, in the military is not dissimilar from that of Hutto’s tormentors, or even Eddie Gallagher. Many of these are the people who Rod notes that he receives complaints from. They certainly believe that they’re the victims of racial discrimination. But there’s a pretty big difference between feeling discriminated against and actually being discriminated against. Again, “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” The key component is “feels like.” Rod (and his fellow whiners) should take note, because they embody this confused mindset perfectly. As he insists, “Wherever you see ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ [DEI] you can know that you, as a white heterosexual, especially as a white heterosexual male, are going to be disfavored.” I don’t usually go into too much detail about my own experience with the military in this space, but I feel compelled to in this instance. To wit: I have never faced discrimination as a white heterosexual male in the military.8 Given that, like Rubin, I’ve never had a CO, XO, or even immediate supervisor who was anything other than a white heterosexual male, it would be pretty ludicrous for me to complain of discrimination.
As for DEI, I’ve already mentioned the inescapable irony of an institution whose primary mission is to kill foreigners embracing it. That said, I’ve worked in military installations, both at sea and ashore, where incidents of sexual assault and racial discrimination are all too common. While, as noted above, this kind of thing cannot be eradicated without fundamentally altering what the military is “for” (i.e., legitimate defense vice imperialism), it’s at least possible that serious attempts at combatting the symptoms may be useful in reducing such problems for the time being. If that means DEI, fine. I’ve been through several military-led DEI talks. They’re basically harmless – they aren’t “anti-white hatred,” nor are they likely to solve the problem of extremism in the ranks.9 One can have a nuanced opinion about this. But no thoughtful person can believe, as Rod does, that the military has deliberately strived for “fewer white people in it to stink up the ranks with their whiteness.”
I suppose the silver lining here is that Rod is doing us all a service by “saying the quiet part out loud.” That is, he’s blurting out the deep, deep ugliness underlying much of the culturally reactionary sentiment in America, which most adherents have the good sense to conceal beneath the usual trusty dog whistles. Someone thank him for me. And someone remind me to remember to cancel my subscription this time, so that this never happens to me again.
The views expressed in this essay are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States government, United States Military, United States Navy, or any other US government organization.
Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body, p. 63
Jonathan W. Hutto Sr., “A Sailor’s Story,” in Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen, eds, Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak out Against America’s Misguided Wars, pp. 184-185; p. 189
Rubin, Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body, p. 43
David Phillips, Alpha, pp. 84-85
David Phillips, Alpha, pp. 142-143
David Phillips, Alpha, pp. 164-165
David Phillips, Alpha, p. 307; p. 68, p. 399
And, since I’m an officer, I’ve not experienced the negative effects of what I sometimes call the “military caste system,” either.
It’s also worth pointing out that “DEI” can mean very different things. The stuff promoted by frauds like Robyn DiAngelo (author of White Fragility, a great title but a terrible book) is indeed awful; largely an attempt to divide workers based on racial identity, which is why corporations love it. But attempts to reduce all-too-real instances of harassment and discrimination are necessary.