The West Point Conundrum: How Do You Fight For A Country You’re Taught To Hate?

West Point has a storied place in American history. During the Revolution, Benedict Arnold tried to give the fort to the British. After the Revolution, it became America’s first military academy, graduating such luminaries as Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, Generals Omar Bradley, Douglas MacArthur, and George S. Patton, and many other men who have shaped our nation. All the alumni were driven by patriotism even if, as with Robert E. Lee, that patriotism was misplaced. Now, though, West Point has a “minor” that is the essence of anti-patriotism. Welcome to West Point’s Diversity and Inclusion Studies Minor.

West Point describes its new minor this way:

Diversity and Inclusion Studies (DISM) is an interdisciplinary minor administered by the Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership that consists of humanities and social science courses. America is a multicultural polity and demands knowledgeable and pragmatic thinkers who understand the range of human experiences. The Diversity and Inclusion Studies Minor (DISM) exposes cadets to varied perspectives & methodologies for understanding and studying the humanities. By carefully drawing from existing courses in multiple departments, the DISM complements and enhances the core curriculum, academic majors, and several West Point Centers and committees. Moreover, the DISM at West Point offers cadets a framework for critically and creatively thinking about the broader impact of diversity and inclusion at the individual, organizational, societal, and/or global levels – providing them with knowledge and insights that can help prepare them to lead in today’s Army.

That academic gobbledy-gook hides what DEI really is: The assertion that America is systemically racist—and sexist and homophobic, and all the other “isms,” “ists,” and “phobias” that drive leftism. Under the DEI rubric, these horrors are baked into the American system. The Constitution, the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act…none of them matter. America and its faults are so inextricably intertwined that you cannot have one without the other. Indeed, you can see the hostility to America’s institutions in the classes students must take for this minor:

Must take 2 of 3

PL377: Social Inequality

EN352: Power and Difference

SS392: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Must Take 1 of 4

HI391: World Religions

HI461: Sex and Civilizations

HI463: Race, Ethnicity, Nation

HI398: Society & Culture in American History

In other words, America is an evil country, both root and branch.

We’ve come to expect that kind of garbage from academia. For decades, colleges and universities have been churning out people who hate America. But what happens when the service academies, the places that ask young people to give their lives for their country and to lead others in doing so, also churn out America haters?

West Point instituted this minor in 2020. What put it on my radar is that, with the first graduates with that minor starting to leave West Point, the inestimable Daniel Greenfield looked at what it means for America when its primary Army academy is training its graduates in race hatred, among other things. I’ve just culled a few points Greenfield makes, but I urge you to read the whole thing:

Creating a DEI minor at West Point was the latest move by a woke military brass to define leadership in terms of the willingness of officers to embrace woke leftist politics. From West Point cadets to serving officers, the message is that leaders cannot lead unless they understand the different perspectives of the intersectional rainbow of race, gender and sexuality, and that they will not understand it unless they view those around them purely in terms of identity politics.

Simply, without DEI, it is impossible to be a leader and to accomplish any assigned mission.

[snip]

Beyond the usual divisive tenets of identity politics, what does DEI in the military really mean? As West Point’s DEI minor shows, it’s impossible to be loyal to both DEI and America.

[snip]

If America’s political system is indeed suffering from “inherent inequalities”, then the only remedy is to transform that system. That is to remake the Constitution. That treasonous proposition clashes with the Army’s oath of enlistment, which is to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”.

Which one is West Point training its graduates to defend: the Constitution or DEI?

What does it mean to defend the Constitution and what does “Duty, Honor, Country” mean if America is defined by, as a course in the DEI minor argues, inherently unequal systems?

And what does it mean when the Army asks its future leaders to define leadership in terms that are fundamentally opposed to the Constitution and the country? Whom are Army officers meant to be loyal to, the terms of their oath or the woke politics that they are being indoctrinated with?

America was a nation built on the rock of the Constitution, the Bible, the free market, and love for country. Our Founders understood that, like the wise man who “built his house upon a rock,” no matter what came his way, “it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock.” That rock has withstood the test of time, allowing the nation to survive a terrible civil war, not to mention three world wars (for I count the Cold War as the third world war).

Meanwhile, those who build their houses upon sand will discover that, as “the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.”

We are systematically removing the rock that underlies America and replacing it, not with sand but with quicksand, specifically designed to drag our nation into stygian depths from which it cannot return. When our military academies have in place programs designed to teach graduates—future leaders and fighters—that theirs is an evil country, you can expect that their guns will not be turned against external enemies but, one day, they’ll be turned against those within America’s borders who still believe the Constitution has value.