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Lohmeir, who served at Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado, made the comments in question on a conservative podcast promoting his self-published book. “The diversity, inclusion and equity industry and trainings we are receiving in the military (…) is rooted in critical race theory, which is rooted in Marxism,” Lohmeir said. Wrong as ever, the commander went on to defend his believed right to spread false facts.
“I was apprised of the option to have my book reviewed at the Pentagon’s prepublication and security review prior to release, but was also informed that it was not required,” Lohmeier said in an email Military.com obtained. “My intent never has been to engage in partisan politics.
“I have written a book about a particular political ideology in the hope that our Defense Department might return to being politically non-partisan in the future as it has honorably done throughout history.” He told The Washington Post he complied with what he understood “was required as part of the pre-publication process.” “The entirety of the work was done during my free time, after duty hours and on weekends, using my own resources,” he said.
Lohmeier used part of his “free time” to interview with the conservative radio program “The Steve Gruber Show.” “What we saw taking place in the country and in the military, frankly, during this past year especially,” Lohmeier said on the show, “was reminiscent of Mao’s cultural revolution where you had to toe a certain party line.” He was referring to Mao Zedong, a Marxist theorist who led China into a deadly, communist “Cultural Revolution.”
Anyone familiar with critical race theory can recognize that the comparison is as unfair as it is baseless. The race theory is more like a fact that’s been realized by some and vehemently denied by others that racism affects nearly every major system in this country from the legal system and the laws that govern it to education and health care. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founder of the theory, defined it in an interview with CNN as a practice that rejects the stark division from past and present with regards to racism. “It’s an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it,” she said.
Marxism, conversely, is a political and economic theory used to rationalize millions of deaths for any departure from the government-established rule of thought and order. Yet it’s critical race theory and not Marxism that Republican-sponsored bills in Arkansas, Idaho, Oklahoma, and Texas aim to ban in public schools. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis supported funding that would exclude teaching the theory. “Let me be clear. There’s no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory,” DeSantis said in March. “Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”
Trump similarly described the theory in his unsuccessful attempt to hold on to his job during a presidential debate last year. “I ended it because it’s racist,” he said. “I ended it because a lot of people were complaining that they were asked to do things that were absolutely insane, that it was a radical revolution that was taking place in our military, in our schools, all over the place.”
He added: “We were paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach very bad ideas and frankly, very sick ideas. And really, they were teaching people to hate our country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen.”
Priscilla Ocen, a Loyola Law School professor, refuted the general thought in a Time magazine interview. “Critical race theory ultimately is calling for a society that is egalitarian, a society that is just, and a society that is inclusive, and in order to get there, we have to name the barriers to achieving a society that is inclusive,” Ocen said. “Our government at the moment is essentially afraid of addressing our history of inequality and if we can’t address it, then we can’t change it.”
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