Stephen Bates

What is the one thing you know the most about?

This will be a long one. But since I'm an active duty officer addressing another higher ranking one, I have to be respectful. That being said, General Montague is correct that the Army needs thinking officers. I believe he is wrong to assume that sending them to Harvard necessarily accomplishes that purpose. The Harvard he entered in the 90s is not the Harvard officers enter in 2026. His article invokes George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Harvard’s war dead and generations of citizen Soldiers to defend an institution that has spent decades consuming the inheritance those men created. The issue is not whether Army officers are intelligent enough to resist indoctrination. Indoctrination is rarely a professor hypnotizing a helpless student. It is an institutional environment in which one set of political assumptions governs admissions, hiring, instruction, social acceptance and administrative protection. The whole gambit. Dissent remains technically possible. But it now becomes professionally expensive. Ask me how I know... The results are no longer theoretical. For years, elite universities built an ideology that judges human beings first by racial, sexual and political category, then insists this is the cure for prejudice. Harvard’s admissions system was ultimately struck down because it used race as a negative, relied upon racial stereotypes and reduced the number of Asian-American students admitted. That was racial discrimination administered by people who had renamed themselves experts in inclusion. The prejudice did not end there. Harvard’s own reports documented Jewish and Israeli students facing hostility and exclusion, while Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, Black students and South Asian students described being harassed, misidentified, called terrorists, spat upon, doxxed and intimidated into silence. The university that promised safety through identity politics produced an environment in which nearly every identity group had reason to fear another. That is the verdict on DEI. It didn't teach students to see one another as individuals. It trained them to organize humanity into competing tribes, assign innocence and guilt by category, and determine whose suffering deserved institutional protection. At Columbia, students were pressured to profess political positions they did not hold, silenced or humiliated in classrooms, and subjected to faculty activism masquerading as instruction. Columbia’s own task force eventually had to warn professors against ideological litmus tests and remind them that students must not be coerced into conformity. When a university must formally instruct its faculty not to politically condition its students, the indoctrination is no longer an accusation. It is an internal finding. These habits are directly hostile to military values. The Army cannot function through racial preferences, collective guilt, ideological litmus tests, selective discipline or separate standards for politically favored groups. Soldiers must be judged as individuals. Standards must be common. Discipline must be impartial. The mission MUST outrank identity. Commanders must tell the truth even when the truth violates the reigning political fashion. The uniform is designed to subordinate tribe to country! DEI restores the tribes and places the institution between them as judge. The general argues that officers are intelligent enough to resist indoctrination. That misses the point. The Army does not owe public money, officers or prestige to institutions that reward conformity, excuse disorder, discriminate by race and turn classrooms into political organizing spaces. Officers SHOULD encounter hostile ideas. They should study Marxism, radical Islam, critical race theory, revolutionary movements and every ideology capable of shaping the battlefield. They should study them as objects of analysis. They should NOT be sent into institutions that have adopted their premises as articles of faith. Harvard once educated men who built and defended the republic. Its age does not grant it permanent immunity from judgment. Neither its war memorials nor the patriotism of its dead can excuse the ideological conduct of its living. The Army does not fear education. It fears an education system that calls racial discrimination equity, political conformity scholarship, selective prejudice inclusion, and institutional disorder courage. I hope this makes sense. Submit this to the general, with my compliments. -Dort

This is anti-worker propaganda. Poop on company time.

I don’t get this account. The NYT op-Ed page doesn’t publish anything like this.