Woke white air force colonel who claimed other white colonels were racists gets promoted to brigadier general By Monica Showalter
The Pentagon has gone to great ends to hide its wokery whenever it gets caught.
They’ve shut down drag shows on U.S. military bases. They’ve kicked openly white-hating wokesters teaching military kids upstairs to other things. They’ve taken down their Pride Month flags and tweets. They’ve changed course on hunting for “extremists” in the ranks when news emerged that they missed actual miscreants under their noses. They’ve investigated dog-sex officer pervert rings that had been going on for a long time in Hawaii. They’ve also denied, in testimony to Congress at appropriations time, that they are wokesters.
But personnel is policy and a look at who they’re promoting tells another story.
Get a load of this charmer, as noted by Kevin Downey at PJMedia:
Enter USAF Col. Benjamin Jonsson. He was nominated by *President Biden to be promoted to brigadier general. Col. Jonsson is white. And “woke.”
Col. Jonsson believes the “problem” with the Air Force is “white colonels” like himself—but not really him, just all the other white colonels.
After the death of Saintly George Floyd, Jonsson penned an article for Air Force Times “calling out” his fellow Caucasian USAF colonels.
“As white colonels, you and I are the biggest barriers to change if we do not personally address racial injustice in our Air Force,” Col. Jonsson began.
The letter reeks of being written by a haughty, green-haired, virtue-signaling white kid who attends high school in an affluent neighborhood.
“Defensiveness is a predictable response by white people to any discussion of racial injustice,” Col. Justice Warrior continued. “White colonels are no exception. We are largely blind to institutional racism, and we take offense to any suggestion that our system advantaged us at the expense of others.
Which tells us they haven’t change their tune at all. They just don’t like getting caught doing it.
Jonsson was one of a group of officers the Pentagon tried to hide into the crowd in a group promotion for Congress to sign off on, Downey notes. To his credit, Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has demanded that all officers be looked at individually. Maybe someone then could ask Jonsson what he meant by all these “white colonels” he sees who are supposedly perpetuating racism in the military, and ask him to name some names so we can see what might have been going on.
Jonsson wrote this essay for Air Force Times in 2020 at the height of the George Floyd riots:
A white colonel worried that a wing-level discussion about the disproportionate rate of Article 15s given to Black Airmen would have a chilling effect on holding minorities accountable and would degrade good order and discipline. He deflected meaningful discussion of racial injustice in the Air Force by summarily stating that such discussion damaged the foundation of military discipline.
A white colonel raised his disagreement with a Black senior enlisted leader’s story of being offered an Article 15 for his boisterous, singing personality when he was an airman. When the Black enlisted leader told the story, he was the only Black person in the room, the only person with first-hand experience on the receiving end of unbalanced Article 15s. By later discrediting the story, the colonel ended further examination of the role of cultural difference on discipline decisions by supervisors.
A white colonel agreed that when anyone joins the Air Force, they need to adopt the culture of the Air Force, that we should not make cultural accommodations. By obscuring any cultural differences in the Air Force, he excused himself from the need to dig into the underlying issue of racial disparity.
He went on and on, fighting with some rival for promotion and always citing unnamed sources to ensure that they would not be able to defend themselves.
Above all, he hewed to the wokester line that the military is brimming with racists and he was the enlightened one who knew how to solve this.
What did he have in mind? Obviously, a promotion to general. He knew that all those white colonels out there were his rivals for promotion so what better than to smear them all to his superiors as racists knowing that the Pentagon brass would reward him with a promotion for his wokesterism?
That tells us he knew the lay of the land for promotions, which is that only the loudly wokester got them. That tells us a lot about military culture right there, and it tells us a lot about his own opportunism.
Tuberville is right to want to investigate this compulsive finger-pointer, because experience shows that the worst accusers of others often have the same record they are accusing others of.
The ‘look! squirrel!’ approach in many cases can also be to deflect scrutiny from themselves. It’s certainly where I’d look given this guy’s willingness to accuse others.
His apparent LinkedIn page suggests he’s a bright guy, with specialized skills that are likely very important to the Air Force.
But bright as he may be, he shouldn’t be commanding others, or setting policy or deciding who else gets promoted. He should be left where he is, with Congress rightly having the last word.
He’s proof positive that the wokester Pentagon hasn’t changed any even as it removes public signs of wokesterism from the public eye any time there is a public scandal,
The Pentagon spent $115 million on DEI “training” (read: indoctrination) which is $30 million more than they spent last year. That’s a lot of consultants. They’ve also flunked out on their military recruitment targets owing to their wokester orientation and even discouraged children from traditional military families with traditional values from joining.
Now they would have us think they are not woke, except that they promote the loudest of the woke to their flag ranks.
Give us a break. And let Tommy Tuberville ask all the questions he likes.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
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