Wokeness in the Military: An Interview with William Thibeau
Editor's Note
Our Armed Forces were once the envy of the world, in large part because we selected based on merit, and instilled in our fighting men an unshakeable military ethos. Both the ethos and the selection, however, have been in steady decline as the Department of Defense succumbs to a dangerous ideology: selection and promotion based on racial and gender identity. Few Americans understand how sweeping this transformation of our military has been. William Thibeau, a former Army Ranger and director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, sat down with Tom Klingenstein to discuss the depth of the crisis and the magnitude of the challenge before President Trump and his pick to run the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
Recently, I interviewed William Thibeau, a former Army Ranger who heads up the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. The purpose of this interview is to give the viewer a good sense of wokeness in the military: what it is, how it operates, how bad it has gotten, and how we might rid ourselves of it.
First, some context. America is being attacked by a regime that wants to destroy her. Let’s call it the woke regime. When an enemy regime wants to destroy you, you are at war. In this case, it is a cold civil war. This war is between those who want to destroy America and those who want to make America great again; between those who hate America and those who love it.
Most Democrats do not hate their country — far from it — but their party is controlled by revolutionaries, the destructive Left, who do. As with all revolutionaries, the destructive Left’s goal of destroying America requires an ideology (in this case, wokeism), a paramilitary operation (Antifa), control of education, propaganda, funding, the ability to spy on citizens, and the power to punish those who challenge the regime. The woke totalitarians have not fully achieved dominance in any of these functions, except perhaps education, but they have made significant inroads in all of them.
In addition to these functions, the woke regime must control the use of force. This brings us to the military, which, although increasingly woke, is still recoverable. But it won’t recover by itself. As a thought experiment, imagine you were tasked with destroying the military, which means destroying the merit system, and replacing it with a military based on quotas. How would you go about it? You would make quotas the primary value of the military, but you wouldn’t call them quotas, because most people don’t like quotas, and they’re supposed to be illegal. Rather, you would call them diversity. And then you would claim that diversity improves military readiness. You would hide all evidence to the contrary.
You would teach diversity, every which way you could. You would teach that America is systemically racist, and whites are oppressors. This narrative would be advanced by the history and language you teach. You would discourage males from enlisting, particularly white ones, and at the same time, you would encourage enlistment by females. For this, you would have to reduce standards and neuter traditional male virtues — all part of an overall effort to feminize the military. This is all happening, and at an increasing rate of speed.
Will fleshes this out.