In his recent viral essay, “The Lost Generation,” published in Compact, Jacob Savage describes how U.S. media and academia in the 2010s closed their doors to millennial white men. The self-righteous, racist ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion wasn’t a problem only within those rarified fields. It also infected the U.S. armed forces. Under President Biden, senior officers worked to make our military less white, precipitating a recruitment crisis.
During the first Trump administration, lethality was the military’s overriding focus. That changed in 2021. Mr. Biden issued an executive order embedding “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” across “all parts of the Federal workforce.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin took the unprecedented step of ordering a “stand-down” to combat “extremism” in the armed forces. By the time an independent report commissioned by the Pentagon found these concerns to be baseless, they had already formed the ideological permission structure for a DEI crusade.