“If the Trump administration merely ended all formal DEI training and initiatives, I wouldn’t be too concerned. They were, after all, never a significant part of what we did. What troubles me most is the attempt to stop all conversations about race and gender. Personal relationships and teams are strengthened by having difficult conversations, conversations that can sometimes make people uncomfortable. Avoiding, or worse banning, those conversations weakens both relationships and teams. Trust, mutual respect and shared values and goals are the foundations of strong teams. All are enhanced by open and candid conversations.
Eliminating any discussion of race or gender will have three negative consequences. The Trump administration and Secretary Hegseth are sending a strong message that white males are in charge again and they don’t want to hear anything about gender or racial inequities. Intended or not, that is what is being heard. Conversations I have had with leaders at all levels of the military indicate this is already having a significant impact on the morale and well-being of a large fraction of the force. Second, this is going to have a very negative effect on recruiting and retention that will deny our military the benefit of some of the most capable people in the nation. By the end of the Biden administration, we had met or exceeded all of the Department of the Air Force’s recruiting goals; I would hate to see that trend reversed. People already serving will choose to leave, and those considering service in the military will find other career options. Finally, the changes being implemented will empower the small minority of people who do have conscious gender or racial bias to act on those views. There aren’t many of these people in our military, but I can say from personal experience that they do exist.
If the Department of Defense and the nation are to move forward on gender and racial issues, we have to do it together. This means that white males like myself must join conversations that we may find uncomfortable and we must develop and display empathy for people unlike ourselves. That is called leadership. Conversations about race and gender are still going to happen no matter what policies are put in place to outlaw DEI training, ban certain words or eliminate affinity groups. Because of what the Trump administration and Secretary Hegseth are doing those conversations just won’t include white males. That is not going to make our military more united or stronger. It is going to make us weaker.”
German middle class people tended to support Hitler’s Nazi Party. They were afraid of Communist rebellion from below and dominating wealthy elites from above.
“France supported the fledgling continental army for about four years with supplies, weapons, advisors, men; you know, [the army got many of its words from the French]. Yeah, I don’t recall France ever telling the U.S. they should just surrender to England. You don’t bend the knee to Communists and dictators…you punch them in the face until they stop. If we bend the knee to Russia now, how long will it be until we beg the dragon that rises in the East to please eat us last?”
Reading the Bible literally is more of a modern phenomenon. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, the official teaching was the Bible is not to be read literally when it comes to things we can know by science.
“the demise of public housing was not an inevitable outcome. As my colleague Rachel Cohen has pointed out, other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can operate mixed-income housing developments that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing doesn’t have to segregate poor people away from the middle class.
So why did public housing in the United States age so poorly?”
…
“efforts to undermine public housing are about as old as the efforts to build it. From the outset, opposition was fierce. Many Americans didn’t like the idea of the government using their tax dollars to subsidize poor people’s housing, and real estate developers were concerned about having to compete with the government.
The Housing Act of 1949, which had a goal of providing “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” bolstered America’s public housing plans by heavily investing in the construction of new housing units. But by then, the federal government had already undermined its own stated plans by capping construction costs (which encouraged using cheap materials and discouraged modern appliances) and allowing racial segregation. Congress had also doomed public housing authorities’ ability to raise revenue through rents in 1936 when it passed the George-Healey Act, which established income limits for who can qualify for public housing — making mixed-income public housing models impossible for federally funded projects.
As housing projects started to draw more Black residents, white people who lived in public housing started leaving, especially after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s banned racial discrimination in housing. This was partly because the Federal Housing Authority pushed for more people to own homes and expanded its loans mostly to white people, helping white families move out of the projects. Black families didn’t receive the same opportunity.
“You saw a change in the racial composition, which simply added to the stigma and the pattern of administrative neglect that characterized many housing authorities,” the historian Ed Goetz told The Atlantic in 2015.
Starting with President Richard Nixon — who declared that the US government had turned into “the biggest slumlord in history” and suspended federal spending on subsidized housing — public housing started facing serious austerity measures and never recovered. Federal investments shifted away from building new public housing units and toward housing vouchers and public-private partnerships.
In the decades that followed, public housing started declining in quality, and Congress funded a program to demolish dilapidated public housing units and replace them with newly constructed or renovated mixed-income developments. But according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, those demolitions were an “overcorrection”; public housing simply needed more funding and better management.”
Eastern European countries were brought and kept in the Warsaw pact by force. These countries wanted to join NATO because they were afraid Russia would invade them.
Before many of them joined NATO, Russia was already violently intervening in its neighbors.
Poland threatened to develop nuclear weapons to defend itself, and got involved in U.S. politics to push for it joining NATO.