A Government Woke and Broken

A trove of federal government training materials reveals the terrible return we’re getting on our tax dollars.

By Douglas Andrews

“Today, the Soldier approached his commanding officer to discuss his newly confirmed pregnancy.”

The above sentence might sound like a knee-slapper from Dave Chappelle’s latest routine, but it’s no joke. Instead, it’s verbatim language taken from “Vignette 6” of a U.S. Army PowerPoint training module titled “Policy on the Military Service of Transgender Persons and Persons with Gender Dysphoria.”

And folks wonder why the Army can’t even sniff its recruitment numbers, and why the confidence of the American people in their once-proud military has taken such a big hit.

While the exact extent to which this sort of perversity has infected the Biden administration is unclear, its rotten fruit is undeniable and all around us in the form of bad policy and incompetent personnel. Call it wokeness, or social justice, or diversity, equity, and inclusion. Just don’t call it good government.

Evidence of this effort to bring even more mediocrity to our federal government has been trickling out here and there in recent years, but a huge trove of it was recently uncovered in federal government training materials via a Freedom of Information Act request. As the Wall Street Journal editorial page notes:

The Department of Veterans Affairs has a gender gingerbread person. NASA says beware of micro-inequities. And if U.S. Army servicewomen express ‘discomfort showering with a female who has male genitalia,’ what’s the brass’s reply? Talk to your commanding officer, but toughen up. … This type of re-education was accelerated by President Biden’s 2021 executive order directing agencies to “increase the availability and use of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility training.” It’s a form of political indoctrination intended to impose woke values on the vast federal bureaucracy and U.S. military.

Not even the math-and-science types at NASA have been spared. If you’re trying to figure out the best way to get a man to Mars, for example, don’t consult an Asian about the life-or-death calculations. As the agency’s training materials tell us, doing so could be construed as a microaggression. Instead, we suppose, you’re supposed to seek out one of those three black women from “Hidden Figures.”

It’s been said that every citizenry gets the government it deserves. But do we really deserve a military that insists men can have babies?

For that matter, do we really deserve a government that makes hiring decisions based on which woke boxes a particular candidate checks rather than said candidate’s, oh, competence? Take Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, for example. (No, really: Take him.) Is it too much to ask that he tend to his cabinet-level post rather than jetting off to Europe during a labor dispute or failing to properly oversee our airline industry ahead of the holiday travel season and the disaster that was Southwest Airlines?

And don’t get us started on Richard Rachel Levine, or Sam Brinton, or Karine Jean-Pierre, or Kristen Clarke, or…

Barack Obama has been out of office for nearly six years, but a vow he made just days before the 2008 presidential election continues to haunt us. “We are five days away,” he said, “from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

On the night of his election, he doubled down on that remark: “It’s been a long time coming,” he told an adoring crowd in Chicago, “but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

“Change has come to America,” he said more than 14 years ago. And so it has.