In this episode of Firebrand, I recap the latest hearings on diversity and equity in the Department of Defense (DOD) and discuss the need for a Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) at the Defense Department. I also talk about the fact that the current chief diversity officer has a salary of $50,000 a year.
00:00:00.000Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
00:00:11.000Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party. He could cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
00:00:17.000So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
00:00:20.000If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots. You are in the right place. This is the movement for you.
00:00:33.000You ever watch this guy on television? It's like a machine. Matt Gaetz.
00:00:38.000I'm a canceled man in some corners of the Internet. Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
00:00:46.000They aren't really coming for me. They're coming for you. I'm just in the way.
00:00:56.000First, I want to chat about the National Defense Authorization Act.
00:01:00.000If you're a regular viewer of Firebrand, you have gone on this journey with us, exposing the grifter generals and the woke military, the radical gender ideology, the divisive racial ideology.
00:01:13.000We want to put an end to that. We love our military. We respect our service members.
00:01:18.000We understand that for America to be strong and free, our military has to reflect the values of the country and not the values of the CHAS, which unfortunately we've seen from a small but unfortunately far too influential group of people at the Pentagon as part of the Biden administration.
00:01:36.000So to break that down, first, I thought I'd give you a context of just the broad scope of the cost of some of these DEI initiatives.
00:01:49.000It's called diversity, equity and inclusion, but that's a misnomer like so many things that we observe in Washington and in corporate culture.
00:01:58.000In fact, DEI is the opposite of inclusion. It's very divisive and they're pushing it in the military.
00:02:04.000My colleague Jim Banks got into a little debate with Democrat lead on the committee, Adam Smith.
00:02:12.000It was pretty interesting to see the perspectives. I'm with Jim Banks. Take a listen.
00:02:17.000Six million man hours of DEI training that has occurred in the military under the Biden administration.
00:02:26.000First of all, that would be person hours, not necessarily man hours. We do we do have women serving in the military, which oddly kind of drives home the point of why it might be worth it to think about a world that isn't just your own world.
00:02:42.000Oh, my goodness. Understand a world, not your own. That's what Adam Smith thinks that the purpose of the military is.
00:02:52.000And unfortunately, it's just this crazy virtue signal. Banks and I continue to make the point throughout the hearing that the time that we have from our service members is precious.
00:03:03.000And that training has to be used for things like cyber and AI, not LGBTQ, AI plus.
00:03:11.000But the woke ism did have its defenders representative to Kudo made arguments in favor of critical race theory.
00:03:19.000She said we need it in the military because we can't possibly win battles in the absence of understanding how racist we all are.
00:03:26.000Play the clip. We have definitely made mistakes as a country.
00:03:32.000And as I listen to the kinds of rhetoric I hear here and the amendments that I see today that we will be voting on, I am terrified for my children and more so.
00:03:42.000I am saddened for our country that it looks very clearly we have not made any progress in learning from the mistakes of our past.
00:03:49.000So fortunately, that was not the prevailing thinking at the hearing.
00:03:56.000Matter of fact, there was an amendment by Congressman Waltz of Florida and myself to completely eliminate critical race theory in the military.
00:04:05.000And I am proud to report to you that the Waltz Gates Amendment to vanquish CRT in the DOD passed.
00:04:12.000It passed out of committee. It's part of the bill.
00:04:15.000That turned out to be a losing argument that was just made by Representative Takudo.
00:04:20.000We also had discussion about this position, this chief diversity officer position.
00:04:25.000Now, of all the officers we need, of all the special operators we need, of all the special warfare and irregular warfare that we have to prepare for, the pilots, the maintainers, the PJs, the load masters.
00:04:38.000They're spending an insane amount of money on these DEI officers.
00:04:45.000Some of them make as much as $183,500 a year.
00:04:49.000That's more than a member of Congress makes.
00:04:51.000And so we passed amendments in this bill to completely eliminate the position of the DEI officer at DOD.
00:05:00.000And we capped the amount of salary that can be made for anyone that's working in this field at like around $50,000 so that it wouldn't be this place for people to go to make more money at the expense of some of the very important skills stacks and readiness capabilities that we need to be on the razor's edge.
00:05:23.000Salud Carbajal debated against – he's a congressman, a Democrat congressman from California.
00:05:29.000He debated against these amendments to get rid of the chief DEI official.
00:06:10.000When you look at every major institution that the left has consumed, they've functionally destroyed it.
00:06:16.000And we can never allow that to happen to our military.
00:06:20.000But there are still those in Congress who claim that the reason that we did not win in Afghanistan was because we didn't have enough DEI and critical race theory.
00:06:32.000And this is an imposterous argument by my colleague, Democrat Congresswoman from California, Sarah Jacobs.
00:07:27.000And unfortunately, it may come at the expense of America's hegemony or safety and security.
00:07:34.000We have to be able to hold the high ground.
00:07:37.000And this is not what's going to get it done.
00:07:39.000And there's another feature of this argument that played out in the hearing.
00:07:42.000Democrat Congressman Horsford says that, well, we have to have all these DEI officers at DOD because they exist in corporate America.
00:07:53.000They exist at the defense contractors.
00:07:55.000And amazingly, my Florida colleague, Carlos Jimenez, Republican, you're going to see him respond to Horsford by pointing out that a lot of these defense contractors only have the DEI obsession and the DEI officials because we require them to, by law.
00:08:47.000And much was made in the last discussion about the fact that major companies have DEI executives.
00:08:55.000And the DOD requires DEI diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates of its contractors.
00:09:00.000In 2020, the DOD issued a memorandum that requires all contractors to implement DEI training programs for their employees.
00:09:06.000The memorandum states that the contractors must provide training on systemic racism, unconscious bias, and other cultural competencies to their employees who work on DOD contracts.
00:09:16.000The training must be provided within 60 days, the award of a contract, and must be recurring.
00:09:21.000Additionally, the contractors must demonstrate that their compliance with DEI mandates through regular reporting.
00:09:27.000So to say that these, you know, are they wrong or are they right, it's mandated by DOD.
00:09:39.000A terrific job by Carlos Jimenez to point out that so often these bad emergences of policy that exists in the private sector can actually be lashed back to too much government.
00:09:53.000And the government making these demands of private entities in order to engage in government contracting.
00:10:48.000And unfortunately, two of my Republican colleagues on the committee joined with Democrats and blocked that amendments passage.
00:10:57.000Now, I have great respect for these colleagues of mine, Don Bacon of Nebraska and Mike Turner of Ohio.
00:11:04.000They voted in favor of the DEI funding that would have been entirely precluded by my amendment.
00:11:11.000But I look forward to working with them to try to see if when this legislation gets to the floor, I can understand their concerns better.
00:11:19.000Because they didn't really offer a lot of criticism during the time allotted for debate.
00:11:24.000General Bacon has put out a statement that he didn't want any amendment to be misconstrued that you couldn't kick racists out of the military.
00:11:31.000And, of course, if people show up and are virulently racist, they would be in violation of many other standards that have existed.
00:11:40.000Gosh, some of which in practice or in writing since the days of the Revolutionary War.
00:11:45.000Certainly, since World War I, those standards have evolved and been developed.
00:11:50.000And they don't have to lean into DEI to ensure that we have the right protection and the right environment to keep our service members safe and focused on the mission.
00:11:59.000And that ought to be our objective, not to try to tell people that they are somehow bad or oppressors or oppressed by virtue of their immutable traits, like the color of their skin.
00:12:12.000But that argument wasn't enough for some Republicans, and it was not enough for Congresswoman Strickland.
00:12:18.000Now, what she offered in debate was this theory that CRT just needs a rebrand because Republicans are weaponizing critical race theory.
00:13:02.000CRT has indeed been weaponized by the left, and that's one weapon we're not going to continue to fund in this National Defense Authorization Act.
00:13:10.000I'm going to continue to update you regarding how the work we have exposed on firebrand and in committees will, I think, really give fuel to the NDAA this year.
00:13:24.000And give a lot of Republicans a reason to vote for it, a reason to support our troops, and to support them not just with pay increases, which we do do and which we should do, not just with new weapons systems, which we do do and we should do, but also with the support they need so that they are not mistreated by some of this wokeism that they've complained to our office and many others about.
00:13:47.000But now I want to get to another important activity that occurred in the House of Representatives this past week, and that was the examination in person of John Durham, Special Counsel John Durham.
00:13:59.000So I'm going to lay out for you right now where I have a perspective that is different from that of some of my Republican colleagues.
00:14:07.500What Chairman Jordan and many of my Republican colleagues rightly, justly, virtuously want to do is use the Durham report as a basis to get rid of some of these illegal spying authorities and the illegal political activity that emerges out of the FBI and DOJ.
00:14:25.160And in Durham's report, indeed, he is critical of the FBI and DOJ.
00:14:31.780But I don't think that is the whole story.
00:14:35.040I think John Durham's part of the cover-up.
00:14:37.440I think that John Durham's report, his flimsy, lame, unsuccessful prosecutions, the purpose of all of that was not to expose the true bad actors in the deep state.
00:14:52.760It was to ensure that, yeah, you can make kind of broad, sweeping criticisms of the FBI and the bureaucracy, and, yeah, it's this clunky thing and needs to change, and sometimes they don't follow all the rules they're supposed to follow.
00:15:05.120Sometimes a few people give in to their biases, as humans do.
00:15:09.420But we never found out who gave the order to run this op.
00:15:15.300And what we know is that the Russia hoax was not the manifestation of some incompetence or tomfoolery at the FBI.
00:15:24.000It was an explicit operation to try to take the presidency away from Donald Trump after the voters had elected him.
00:15:34.200I'm going to play for you in just a moment the full exchange that I have with John Durham.
00:15:39.220And what I want you to ask yourself as you're watching, do you agree with my Republican colleagues that John Durham is a do-gooder who really did everything he could to get to the bottom of this?
00:15:50.700Or was he just another person containing the damage and playing the part?