[The Free Press] Retired Air Force Brigadier General Christopher Walker, 59, spent almost two years as a senior adviser to the Air Force’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the Pentagon, attending dozens of meetings about implementing DEI initiatives. This was an unusual role given Walker’s career path: He had over 400 hours of combat flights and, most recently, had overseen West Virginia’s Air National Guard.
But in 2021, when the Air Force established its Office of Diversity and Inclusion, staffers assumed that Walker would be on board with their belief that DEI was a "warfighting imperative." Why? Because Walker is black. But that assumption was wrong.
Walker was a mole.
Alarmed by DEI programs that were little more, in his view, than "Soviet indoctrination," he leaked information to an organization called Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS). This group consists of retired military veterans and civilians who oppose woke ideology in the military. They, in turn, alerted lawmakers like Sen. Tom Cotton and Rep. Mike Waltz about what they were hearing from Walker and other active duty service members who opposed the military’s diversity policies.
"No one delved into how I thought," Walker told The Free Press. "They took one look at me and assumed I believed these things. I learned to listen and had to bite my tongue a lot."
Walker, who prefers to go by his pilot call sign, Mookie, took notes and mostly kept his head down, so he could keep reporting what was going on. "I thought, If this is allowed to stand, all of the senior people within the [Department of Defense] are going to bring along this propaganda and get rid of anybody who doesn’t go along with it."
Mookie recalled a private meeting in 2022 attended by generals and other key Pentagon staffers. At the meeting, Alex Wagner, the Air Force assistant secretary, asked the group to brainstorm ways to get the general public to accept drag shows on Air Force bases.
Close to retirement and with nothing to lose, Mookie finally spoke up. "I reminded the group that since the 1980s, the Air Force has not allowed lingerie shows," he said. "They don’t allow burlesque shows. So why would we allow drag shows?"
His comment seemed to have an effect. In June 2023, the Department of Defense officially banned drag shows on all military installations.
But that was the exception, not the rule. In 2022, Mookie recalls attending a training course at Georgetown University for Air Force generals and senior officers called "Managing for Inclusion." The professor, he said, informed the group that white people were oppressors and black and Hispanic people were the oppressed, so they couldn’t be racist. The professor also taught the class how to ask someone for their pronouns at the beginning of a conversation. 
|
