On Friday, famed author J. D. Vance, who wrote the bestselling book “Hillbilly Elegy” and is reportedly considering a run for the United States Senate in Ohio, slammed Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley after Milley, defending the reading of Critical Race Theory texts in the military, told the House Armed Services Committee, “I do think it’s important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read and the United States Military Academy is a university and it is important that we train and we understand, and I want to understand white rage and I’m white.”
Vance blasted, “I personally would like American generals to read less about ‘white rage’ (whatever that is) and more about ‘not losing wars.'”
“What I find so enraging about the Joint Chiefs’ pandering on progressive wokeness is that they know damn well the geography and politics of who dies in American wars,” he wrote angrily. “The conservative Americans you trash are disproportionately bleeding for this country.I’m glad you got your viral clip, General. Maybe you should try defending the enlisted folks, their families, and their values.”
I personally would like American generals to read less about “white rage” (whatever that is) and more about “not losing wars.”
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) June 25, 2021
I’m glad you got your viral clip, General. Maybe you should try defending the enlisted folks, their families, and their values.
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) June 25, 2021
Milley continued by asserting, “I’ve read Mao Tse-Tung; I’ve read Karl Marx; I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”
Milley got defensive about charges that the military has gone “woke”: “And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned, non-commissioned officers, of being ‘woke’ or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there.”
Watch: Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just now on Critical Race Theory, ‘Wokeness’ & Jan. 6. “I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding…the country which we are here to defend?” pic.twitter.com/KsRtOoWN0w
— James LaPorta (@JimLaPorta) June 23, 2021
On Thursday, Vance ripped into the teaching of Critical Race Theory, telling Fox & Friends:
One of the things that worries me so much about this Critical Race Theory is that it’s being pushed by all of these powerful institutions in our society. The Biden administration is pushing it; Google is pushing it; Amazon is funding the curricula. Why do these people, why do these institutions want us to believe that white people are oppressors, that black people are victims, and that America is inherently evil?
Noting that members of the public had been shut down when they attempted to protest at the Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting, he asserted:
One of the ways you know you’re winning a debate is if they try to shut down the discussion, right? We know that so many parents, black, white, Democrats, especially Republicans of course, they don’t like to teach their kids that this is fundamentally a terrible, racist country. They don’t want this crap in their schools. They should be allowed to express that viewpoint; and I think the fact that people are trying to shut them up suggests we’re actually winning. Our side is actually winning in this, which means that in Loudoun County but also across the country, we’ve got to keep on pressing this case and keep on making this argument.