STARRS Podcast
STARRS Podcasts includes the series STARRS & Stripes which interviews military veterans, talks about their careers and military service, and their concerns about what is happening in today's military. See our website, starrs.us, for more information.
STARRS Podcast
STARRS Town Hall with Guest Speaker Rick Addante: DEI is NOT Dead at the Department of War
"The truth is not for sale, and my integrity is never will be." These powerful words from Dr. Rick Adante capture the essence of this eye-opening conversation about the covert continuation of DEI and Critical Race Theory in American universities despite official bans.
As a former tenured neuroscience professor with 25 years in academia, Dr. Adante reveals shocking undercover footage of university presidents explicitly plotting to circumvent federal and state mandates prohibiting DEI programs. His evidence shows administrators brazenly discussing how they'll "change words but not actions" while laughing about continuing to teach courses like "DEI 101" without consequences. When Dr. Adante exposed these deceptions, he was fired and offered nearly $100,000 in hush money—which he refused.
What makes this particularly alarming is the military connection. With college degrees required for officer advancement and millions flowing from the GI Bill and ROTC programs, these universities function as a Trojan horse that indoctrinates future military leaders against the very country they're sworn to defend. The Florida Tech president specifically mentioned focusing on U.S. Space Force funds while continuing prohibited DEI initiatives, directly linking these practices to national security concerns.
The conversation extends beyond exposing the problem to offering solutions. STARS General Counsel Mike Rose details ongoing efforts to help service members whose careers were destroyed through DEI-driven disciplinary actions, while Dr. Adante challenges the fundamental premise of DEI ideology with a powerful alternative: "Diversity is not our strength. Our strength is what unites us."
Join this crucial conversation about protecting our military readiness and national identity from ideological subversion. If you care about the future of American education and military excellence, this is essential listening that connects dots between academic deception and our nation's security.
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For more information about STARRS, go to our website: https://starrs.us which works to eliminate the divisive Marxist-based CRT/DEI/Woke agenda in the Department of Defense and to promote the return to a warfighter ethos of meritocracy, lethality, readiness, accountability, standards and excellence in the military.
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Good morning everyone. Welcome to another Stars Town Hall. On behalf of Lieutenant General Rod Bishop, our board chair, and other members of our leadership team, I am Ron Scott, president and CEO, and today's host. Cindy, if you would please display the American flag, we'll get this started off in proper fashion. Now, everyone, please join me in our Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Let me cover a few administrative protocol tips. Those in attendance today include senior and junior officers, enlisted men and women, non-veteran patriots and our colleagues in the media. So keep that in mind. We are recording the session and we will post it on the STARS website. We are completely transparent and we want people to know who we are and what we are doing. Please mute your microphone unless you're speaking, and to speak we ask that you raise your hand. There's an icon at the bottom of the window here that you can press to raise your hand so we can call on you. And please use the chat box. If you've got comments, observations, you know, go ahead and include those in the chat box, and some of them we will address during the session. Today's lineup I'll make a few introductory remarks about STARS activities and then we'll have a presentation by Dr Rick Adante, another individual who's been in the news and someone that's demonstrating some tremendous leadership, given some of the cultural issues that we're wrestling with, and then we'll have a short follow up by STARS General Counsel, the Honorable Mike Rose, and then we'll open up to questions and answers. So a couple of quick introductory comments. Quick introductory comments.
Speaker 1:Stars has achieved its goals of removing DEI, crt and DEI from the Department of Defense and seeking remedies for those that were harmed by the COVID vaccination. We're currently recommending a concept called Operation Sentinel, which consists of four pillars. The first is a duty honor country commission that's being pushed by our friends in the MacArthur Society at West Point. The second one is a warfighter education reset. Here we're talking the war colleges, all of our training programs and the K-12 Department of Defense education system. The third is Operation Rescue and Restore, which is fully in play right now thanks to Mike Rose, our general counsel. And the fourth pillar is Operation Right the Wrongs, and that was addressed most recently in a meeting that was hosted by Undersecretary of War for Personal Righteousness, general Tata, and more will follow. We're also working with Congress to get merit in the legislative language as it relates to admissions to our service academies.
Speaker 1:And, finally, we're doing a nationwide push on a presentation that we put together called the American Creed Threatened by Radical Ideology. It's getting a very favorable response and we invite you to take a look at it and, if you're so inclined, take it on, use it, tailor it to your own purposes. But what we see is there's a real hunger out there for Americans true Americans who believe in their country to get a better feel for what we're dealing with, and that there are very good things that we can do to get beyond that, without violence, without hatred, without some of the negative things that we see playing out in our society today. So that's a noble mission and we invite you to be part of it mission and we invite you to be part of it.
Speaker 1:So with that, I'd like to introduce our guest speaker for today, dr Rick Adante. We posted his bio on the registration site so you have a chance to see what his background is. He's an incredibly credentialed individual who demonstrated the courage to do something that was right. They offered him $96,000 while they were kicking him out of a tenured position to remain silent, he refused to accept the 30 pieces of silver and left the university to become a whistleblower. So Rick has demonstrated tremendous courage, definitely aligned with the whole mission of STARS. And at this time I'd like to hand it over to Rick, who's got a set of slides that he's going to present in his presentation. Rick, over to you.
Speaker 2:Hi, thank you very much. It's a very humbling honor to join such an esteemed group as all of you and I thank you, sir, and I thank everybody for your time in advance. Like I said, it is a truly humbling opportunity. I'm going to share my screen with some slides that I've prepared that will help to tell a little bit of the story of the journey that Mr Scott just alluded to. I'm a civilian, so I apologize in advance if I get any military terminology wrong or anything like that, so apologies in advance.
Speaker 2:I am a civilian. I've served for 13 or 15 years or so with the Air Force Auxiliary that you may know as the Civil Air Patrol, but ultimately I've worked in academia for 25 years and I'm here to share a little bit of a story of exactly what it is that I've seen from the inside, as you might think of as deep cover of academia, and give essentially a direct action report of exactly what is happening and perhaps some steps necessary to fix it. So the main thesis here is that DEI is not dead. It's being laundered, as I've observed it, and it's being laundered to stay alive and well into the Department of War. So I have been a tenured professor at Florida Institute of Technology and the Department of Psychology, and also with biomedical engineering. I'm a neuroscientist by trade I'll share a little bit about my background in a moment and I currently run some small LLCs. But I'm otherwise unemployed and doing the best I can to speak truth of what's happening that people aren't going to be able to see behind the closed doors of the pillars of academia, because I've been on the inside and I'm going to tell you and I'm going to show you video of exactly what it is that's happening. So I had a very different talk planned when we first scheduled this until the events of last week, and I would be remiss if I didn't start by acknowledging the importance of DEI as related by Charlie Kirk. I have a few of his quotes here.
Speaker 2:That says President Trump's war on DEI is one of his most important accomplishments so far and, as was alluded to in the beginning of this session, that is due in no small part to everyone on this call and the leadership of this group and the courage of this group to take it forward from a time when it was not at the forefront of popular issues to champion. But you guys have done that and that is a great testament to you, charlie Kirk said. The Secretary of Defense, pete Hegseth, said DEI is dead at DOD and we're going back to gender neutral, colorblind, merit-based performance standards. And when the terrible tragedy happened in the Texas floods not very long ago at all he asked why isn't every leader in Texas connecting the dots here? The Austin fire chief was there because of DEI and failed to deploy resources because he didn't understand the word reimbursement. Charlie was a champion of the same issues that you guys are a champion of. On the military side. He was helped leading the charge forward on the civilian side and on the right-hand side.
Speaker 2:Here is his own website, professor Watch, that Turning Point USA owned and led, featuring the story that I broke with James O'Keefe about Florida Institute of Technology and our president there, john Niccolo, who I caught on undercover video admitting and conspiring with a cabal of other faculty to defraud and lie to Governor Ron DeSantis' face and the federal government for many, many millions of dollars. And I will be sharing that with you as we go along. But I think that we would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge this leadership here from Charlie and how much this meant to him and his vision of what he saw was important and the alignment of what you guys have seen important in leading our country forward. Because, as many here know, and certainly we've all learned recently, our time will come like a thief in the night we won't know when it comes. And that is a call for courage. That's not an excuse for cowardice, but to make sure that every day we go to bed knowing that we lived this day right and lived it with integrity and courage in the way that Charlie did every day and the way he extolled all of us too.
Speaker 2:So I wanted to start by acknowledging that because, as I'll allude to later on through this presentation, I shared much of this on the show of James O'Keefe which was called my Price is my Life, and he said if your price is not your life, then you are for sale. And Charlie was never for sale and he paid that price. And he's not alone. There've been many heroes and champions who are willing to lay down their life for the truth, and he certainly did, and I know many here uh, know many others who did too. So we are here because of them and we are here to take that forward and I intend to.
Speaker 2:So one champion of that that's been leading this forward is straight from many of your guys' contacts, mr Matt Lohmeyer, undersecretary of Defense for the Air Force. He led this forward right in response to the Charlie Kirk tragedy. He said thank you for bringing this to our attention. We've now visited members' Facebook pages and seen public criticism of the commander-in-chief pictures he posted upside down US flag. We will verify and take swift action. And he said it was brought to our attention what appears to be explicit violations of the oath to defend the Constitution coming from a uniformed service member, the public criticism of our commander-in-chief and overall partisan behavior. There will be swift action taken. This is the mark of an absolute champion. I am grateful as a civilian for the leadership that's being taken and this is one of the big messages that I will return to. Ending with today is the call for that civic leadership, that civic courage that so many here in the room know of on the military side, and the physical courage and the battle courage. The battle is now on the civilian side and leadership like this coming from your group is such a humble honor to be able to speak with you, because this is the result that we see of all the hard work of everyone here. Is that kind of leadership, taking this forward and connecting these dots, as Charlie said to do just in the slide prior.
Speaker 2:So background about me. I'm not going to go through all these, but the point is that I had an illustrious academic career for 25 years, starting with an undergraduate degree in psychology at the College of New Jersey. I was a four-time NCAA wrestler, was a volunteer relief worker at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001,. A Rhodes Scholar finalist, awarded the Marshall Smith Award for the top student in psychology and John Wandition Award for truth and integrity. I went on to get a PhD in neuroscience at the University of California, was a diversity fellow at the American Psychological Association, a National Research Service Award winner, president of the National Neuroscience Graduate Student Association. There I went on to become a three-year postdoctoral fellow at UT Southwestern Medical, a tenured professor, ultimately at Florida Tech, with stopovers at University of Texas, at Dallas and Cal State, san Bernardino. So what I'll be sharing with you today is a snapshot of things I've seen from all sorts of states and all sorts of different kinds of institutions across America.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned earlier, I've also been a volunteer pilot and aerospace education officer at the Civil Air Patrol, dallas Composite Squadron, riverside Squadron. Patrick Space Force Base Squadron. I was an Education Officer of the Year and a Commercial Multi-Engine Pilot. I've served on several NASA operational missions, was a Mission Specialist at the HERA mission, where I lived in a space capsule at NASA Johnson Space Center for the largest study they do on psychology for long duration missions. Principal Investigator of a NEEMO mission, which is NASA astronauts living under the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean here off the coast of Florida, and was a finalist for astronaut selection in the year 2017, making the top 0.07% out of 18,350 people. So a lot of scientific contributions awards. But I'm still the editor of several associate editor of several journals and societies. All of that's now gone because of the role that we caught DEI playing and I'm going to share with you exactly how that looks.
Speaker 2:One of my core theses to you here is that DEI is a Trojan horse of the American universities that has been and will continue to be used as military readiness in the respect of personnel advancement. College degrees are required for military officers and especially required for additional promotions, as I understand it, through higher levels as a civilian, what I might think of as brass level or flag officers, masters, phds it's from my understanding, it's really tough to go anywhere on climbing the career ladder if you're not going through that academic pathway. The GI Bill pays for enlisted and officer education with an inordinate amount of funding I must presume of millions of dollars. And ROTC is a very common organization on campuses all across the country that relies upon Department of War funds to train military personnel in addition to the GI Bill that, I think, goes through the Department of Veteran Affairs. In addition, department of War funds a major component of academic research at institutions across the country through DARPA, through NewArks.
Speaker 2:And what does this DEI have as a consequence of how it impacts the Department of War? Well, one, it infiltrates these institutions with a faulty ideology that is ultimately an ideology of hate and division and exclusion. It indoctrinates students and future leaders. It teaches students who are DOD personnel to hate America through their ideology and the results are that it will find the ultimate destruction of America because it will lead its countrymen to destroy each other. We are seeing that even within the last week or so of everything that's transpired since the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, in that we have now seen the ideologies of many people that are put forward and the hate that they have to this country. A lot of that comes from ideologies that they've been taught through these institutions, and that has not just been on the civilian side, as a few slides ago acknowledged. That has been a common finding, and the military personnel posting on public websites too. I suggest to you that this is an existential problem. We must fight back or we will lose the republic, because we will not have any left who are willing to defend it if they are taught to hate it.
Speaker 2:So, 25 years, what have I seen from the inside? Going back to post 9-11 college in New Jersey, I saw our college prohibited the flying of American flags from dorm windows. I was writing op-eds in the paper against that. At this point, almost 25 years ago. Moving forward to UT Dallas, when I first started my first faculty position, I was confronted by the dean of the school, who asked me to help a university student who happened to be a military veteran from the Navy SEALs and help him to understand a scam that was being conducted by the University of Texas at Dallas at the Center for Brain Health on soldiers suffering from traumatic brain injury and using them for funding and raising funding On election night of 2016,. I was having beers, like many people were watching that evening's events, sitting next to a professor, amy Von Shagen, who called for the assassination of the president-elect at that time.
Speaker 2:As 2017 emerged, we saw the rise of Antifa and the resistance sales by students, faculty administrators on the academic side, much as we did in the field of government, students, faculty administrators on the academic side, much as we did in the field of government. Of course, we are all familiar with in this group the coercion and tyranny that the COVID-19 pandemic brought forward between vaccines, masks, compliance and anti-science indoctrination. And as we move forward, we've seen the rise of transgenderism taking control and ideological capture of the institutions. Just last year, I published, I was asked to review a textbook that included the codification of transgender therapies and gender-affirming health care for people and underage minors, and I was faced with the opportunity to overlook that, but we chose not to. We spoke the truth and we published critical corrections of that textbook as well. What I'm here to talk about today is what we've seen.
Speaker 2:Is the president of Florida Tech we caught with James O'Keefe and O'Keefe Media Group admitting to lying about complying with the federal and state mandates that are supposed to be prohibiting DEI, to make us think that DEI is dead. I'll share with you a video on that in a moment. And in that conversation he says that we may lose some funding, but he's going to focus on using the US Space Force funds to compensate for that in particular. And we can see on the right. Here is a screenshot of the ribbon-cutting ceremony of a new educational facility that the Space Force has opened up at Patrick Space Force Base in order to partner with this institution, florida Tech. That is accepting federal funds and indoctrinating its students with critical race theory and DEI. That is not supposed to be happening, ultimately teaching them to hate America and potentially to even celebrate these political assassinations based on that indoctrination. I caught that on tape.
Speaker 2:They were conspiring to defraud the state and federal governments. They were saying we will change our words, but do not change your actions. The president said I think critical race theory is valuable history. It should be taught. He said he thinks that diversity is the same thing as giving veterans preference. Veterans preference, even though veterans earn their preference and protection from discrimination by their service and their courage and their bravery and their sacrifice, whereas diversity, equity and inclusion promotes people based upon illegal discrimination of factors that are not earned. He acknowledged that we teach a class called DEI 101. And then they went on video and laughed about it because they know that they've never been caught and they never thought they would be and so far they've never been held accountable. They went on to say how they were going to change the catalog of courses, their names and descriptions, even after students have registered, in order to hide DEI and CRT, which is a different kind of fraud, of false advertising.
Speaker 2:And more recently, if any of you guys are alumni or related to Texas A&M, there's a big military culture there. State Senator Brian Harrison has done a fantastic job in real time every day the last two weeks, breaking news stories of how they are also engaging in DEI indoctrination with courses about trans justice. So these things connect and they connect for me at a very personal level in seeing the tragic assassination of Charlie last week, because these DEI seeds are the same seeds of these trans justice courses that are being taught. They're the same seeds that blossomed into the weeds of the shooters who actually committed these heinous acts of murder. And make no mistake, they were shooting at Charlie, but they were aiming at all of us and they won't stop because they said that that is their goal. They won't stop because they said that that is their goal. I've also caught other presidents at Cal State admitting to believing that anyone in the current administration has residual white supremacy and it's his job to denigrate them and bring them down. That hasn't broken in the news, but I'll share that with you later if we have time. So I was fired upon reporting that I was now unemployed, lost my job.
Speaker 2:This was not very long ago. About six or eight weeks ago, they offered me almost $100,000 in hush money to stay silent. I said the truth is not for sale. My integrity is not for sale and it never will be. We walked away with nothing, but we kept everything intact in respect to our dignity and my integrity. And when I say our, I mean my wife too. She's been an absolute hero in helping to support this. Much like the military spouses that keep the home front afloat during times of challenge, she has been an absolute hero to our family too. I'll share with you a little video here. That is a compilation, so you can see exactly what it is that I'm talking about. This is about three, three and a half minutes.
Speaker 5:The era of DEI is gone at the defense department.
Speaker 6:The president, a man named John Nicklo talking about changing the wording to get around the presidential executive order in order not to lose funding.
Speaker 8:The summarization is like yeah, we're going to screw, we're going to pretend that we're not pushing DEI, but we're really pushing DEI.
Speaker 3:Screw them and give me the money. Was that kind of a?
Speaker 4:good summary.
Speaker 8:It was that, but even more summary, it was that, but even more, I've always used the claim that you were opposed to diversity. Yeah, I am. How do you feel about the veterans? We opened the paddock to Space Force off site instructional, off campus instructional site. In the fall. I said are you saying critical race theory? He said, yeah, yeah, how do you feel about that? I said, well, I believe in teaching all the district, the good and the. Yeah, I can feel about that. I said, well, I believe in teaching all the district, the good and the bad. I believe in. I'm saying it's a removed course.
Speaker 8:It's probably a very dominant course Deeds, not words. Diversity is important for a number of reasons.
Speaker 5:I think this is a valuable part of education.
Speaker 8:And if we have to change some words so they're not being scraped and so we're not targeted, it allows us to do our work Deeds, not words. You know, $7 million that's a lot of money, but if I lose $7 million we can live. We can live with it. In fact he teaches DEI 101, because that course would not be a public university curriculum before. My inclination is that you continue to teach those courses. The way I put it, the verse we have in place, we're going to do what we do. Let's not unnecessarily the target on our back.
Speaker 2:Just tell the truth, ed.
Speaker 5:Deeds, not words.
Speaker 8:We opened a space force off site, off campus instructional site. In the fall, we're just looking for words. And we modify some of the language we have not changed. If you notice our core values on our website, diversity is important for a number of reasons.
Speaker 5:First and foremost, up front, you have to tear out DEI and CRT initiatives, root and branch out of institutions 100%.
Speaker 8:We have a force, and it was called DEI 101.
Speaker 5:We have a force Deeds, not words.
Speaker 6:Rick says there are certain times that we are all called. He has now been fired recently from Florida Tech for coming forward with video evidence showing what appears to be an alleged fraud and cover-up. They offered you $100,000 to shut up and you didn't take it.
Speaker 9:Yeah, we felt free. We're done with that shit. We're done with that shit.
Speaker 2:Okay, so um my hope is that you guys are still with me on this and I ended on that component to that video of the discrepancy between not just the words versus the actions but what's being said by two different people. You have the president of a university saying we're obviously not done undermining the federal government's requirements for accepting federal funds so that we can continue to indoctrinate you, your children, your grandchildren in critical race theory and DEI versus the Secretary of War and, of course, speaking for the president of the United States, saying that shit is done. So you have this big discrepancy here where people think it's over, they think it's done, but what's happened is I caught them burrowing and actually describing how they are going to be resisting and fighting back so that they can keep your money to indoctrinate your children and destroy this nation. If you want to see the written versions of that, there's two sub stacks I have linked here to that will tell those story, the details. They provide video support and all that good stuff and the links to the respective shows that have been done One by James O'Keefe there, and David Rutherford is a retired SEAL and CIA contractor that just had a show come out detailing those details.
Speaker 2:A week or two ago.
Speaker 2:I had a show come out detailing those details a week or two ago, and so it's not just the DEI that's happening there, but what we can also see is that, or what I can tell you, is that this DEI is being taught by foreigners on H-1B visas, such as Brandon May, who I participated in his hiring from just a year or two ago.
Speaker 2:He's very junior, he's not very bright. I caught him faking his qualifications on his resume, which is immigration fraud, and he came here and he says he wants to do influence operations on American citizens. He participated in that, co-conspiring with the president to defraud those funds, as was captured by James O'Keefe. He was in that video and if you're familiar with the Minerva Institute at the Pentagon, that was shuttered under scandal for surveilling and coercing American citizens with propaganda, that is what he was seeking to do and I'll see if I can show you a clip of that too. So when we talk about the influence on DOD, on our warfighters and military personnel going to college for what you might think of as an innocent education on the GI Bill or ROTC or continuing professional development, these are the people on the inside and what they're doing, not just with DOD funds, but they're teaching students as well, so here's a clip of his.
Speaker 9:Brandon, you just got to deploy some of those memes for propagandizing to the right way that you guys do.
Speaker 2:We have a project rejected on the basis of ethics, as they argue that we don't do these types of things, so influence operations don't exist, apparently, really, yeah, okay, so for timing I'll keep that short, but you saw the gist of it there. He says I had a project at DoD rejected because even DoD said it was poor ethics, and they said that we don't do those things anymore that he was asking to do, which was influence operations. As a European foreigner, coming in a time now where people are grieving a national political assassination, when we have people come back from war fighting PTSD, other things like that, 90 percent of the psychological services and trainees and programs are women who are ideological liberal DEI sympathizers, who've often now been caught with great disdain for the values and beliefs of American military personnel, and we've seen that now, in the aftermath of this recent assassination, psychology has a major problem with this lack of political diversity. I'm not the first person to say it. There's a great paper that was published by Joe Duarte in 2015 in Brain and Behavioral Sciences, which literally chronicled the data of how ideologically captured the field of social and psychology is and the implications for that long term. So I suggest here that this also becomes a force readiness issue and preservation of the total force related threat If the kinds of places we're going to send people to to get services, and under the umbrella that struggles, are a mental health problem that we need to prioritize. Well, let's pull back the onion and look under the hood a little bit there and say who are we sending our people to to get treated for mental health issues? They're going to be people that don't understand them, or or or perhaps sympathize with the people who assassinated Charlie or whatnot. That is a problem in its own right. So what are some pathways forward that we can do for that? Well, for one thing, charlie gives us that pathway.
Speaker 2:He tweeted here March 5th of this current year that Lockheed Martin had earlier promised to end its DEI programs but it looks like it hasn't. He said, from endorsing child gender transitions to non-binary single-use bathrooms, this is abhorrent. He said they should cut off all federal contracts if they're still doing business with the federal government. You and I all know that that's not happening. So it is a fantastic thing that DOD and Department of War, if they've gotten rid of all the ways they think DEI is embedded in the department, that is fantastic. I celebrate and I cheer them Truly, truly, truly.
Speaker 2:We have champions in there doing wonderful things to right that ship, but it can't just be extinguishing the PowerPoints that say diversity and DEI on them. We have to look deeper under the hood and understand where these ideological seeds are being planted and burrowing. And where are we sending our money to indoctrinate our people, our personnel and our children? We will lose this war of attrition if we only play whack-a-mole and ask for the resignation of each mole that we catch after they've done the dirty deed. I suggest that we can find better use in replacing all sympathizers of DEI and critical race theory and imposing these unconstitutional coercions like vaccinations. This includes professors, staff administrators and boards of trustees. They all need to be replaced.
Speaker 2:I'm telling you from the inside that if they were to fire my president at the Florida Institute of Technology, the chairman of the board of trustees gave a full throated endorsement of him when O'Keefe had this story came out, because if you Google her, kristen Dreger sees a senior executive in engineering at Lockheed Martin out here outside of Kennedy Space Center and Patrick Space Force Base. She has a ton of stories written about how big of a champion she is for diversity at Lockheed and how she says that's the key to engineering success, and I think that the people who were in the Boeings that weren't going and the Starliner that was stuck in space might have a difference of opinion. These institutions cannot be allowed to self-certify compliance. That's another big issue of what's happening here on the inside is when we think DEI is dead. It's only because you ask them to tell you that they're not doing it. But, as I hope I've convinced you with through video, they are lying to you. They're absolutely lying to you. When they're done lying to you, they're laughing about you. They're laughing about it because they know they're going to get away with the lie to comply.
Speaker 2:This is an unconventional war and it's being waged against us to beat us, and I suggest that we need to adopt unconventional warfare approaches to beat the enemy. Within Just last night, if you're not aware of the news, it was incredible as far as I'm concerned that the president of the United States issued a declaration that the organization of Antifa is now declared a terrorist organization, with all the trappings that come along with that. This is, I think, a terrific approach to addressing this unconventional warfare being waged against us. There's been a massive ideological capture of institutions for decades. They're a core threat to the United States of America and I think things that people aren't yet thinking about and talking about as pathways to look at in terms of policy and approaches include the accreditation of universities and programs. That's usually housed through the Department of Education, but there's been great new efforts being led by governors in Florida and Georgia to create these new regional accrediting bodies that aren't going to be suffering the same ideological capture, and the same is true for professional licensing and certifications the American Psychological Association, american Medical Association, american Academy of Pediatrics I'm sure I don't have to tell you, guys, if you have overlapping interest in the issues of the COVID vaccine mandates in the military and the civilian world. They're wildly captured ideological organizations that are not necessarily the purely professional medical, scientific organizations that they brand people to think that they are. I think that they're capturing. We have a serious termite problem in this house and fumigation is the only option. We have to replace the leadership or decertify their accrediting processes, because this is the way that it is burrowing. This is the way that the Trojan horse is being used to launder DEI right back into the DOD, the DOW. That is assuming that they're now clean, but they're not.
Speaker 2:We've seen DEI impact operational things. I've seen it in missions we've worked on at NASA. The things that were the worst challenges of our team and the success of our mission were the things that people say are our differences? Your differences are not our strength. Diversity is not our strength. It's what unites us, that we share together. That is our strength, that helps us to overcome our differences. So this is a slide I typically give about what made our team succeed, and it was our similarities that overcame our differences. And our strength was what united us operationally as a mission unit and team members. It was not our differences, that was our strength. It was what we shared that gave us the greatest strength, amid those moments where we're always going to have some differences of opinion and that's the nature of humanity but the other part of that humanity is that our strength is the humanity of what we share together as humans, as countrymen.
Speaker 2:And so I suggest to you that DEI is this existential threat to the future of our nation. It's a Trojan horse. It's morally wrong. It's factually wrong Critical race theory does not teach accurate American history. It's legally wrong. The Department of Justice has clearly indicated that. It's illegal forms of discrimination. It's a threat to team cohesion and mission operational success. It's a threat to competency, excellence and, ultimately, victory.
Speaker 2:And that moniker that everyone's been drummed with that diversity is our strength I wouldn't humbly but confidently tell you that's not true. Diversity is not our strength. Our strength is the things that unites us. Diversity is not our strength. Our strength is the things that unites us. That is our sameness. And I'm not talking about color, I'm not talking about economic class. The things that unites us are our values, our values and the belief of God, country and family. That is what makes us our country. That is what makes us strong.
Speaker 2:And so when they are telling you that it's gone and done, they're lying to you, they're laughing at you and they're indoctrinating your children to hate your country while they're laughing at you and while they're lying to you. And we're going to need them back to defend our country. So why is the Department of Defense and VA continuing to fund the academic institutions? I would say that this is a pathway that can be explored creatively and unconventionally. Hold those funds back until the changes are seen and don't have them self-certified. We need to have the courage to fight these wars of culture and society on the home front, and that means overcoming the fears of losing jobs, losing reputations, but maintaining our dignity, our integrity and certainly our hope for the future of the country. So that's what I shared with James here. I said wars are not fought by childless men and it's not the excuse for cowardice having children, but they are the reason for us to have courage. So with that, I know we're looking at a time transition here.
Speaker 2:So I want to thank you guys. I want to thank God and prayers for everyone. Our US service to women has made it possible for us to speak freely and exercise this free speech. Thank James O'Keefe and the O'Keefe Media Group for featuring these stories and Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA for covering that and pushing that out. When it did the David Rutherford Show, the voters and the Trump administration helped to work with you guys through policy and lobbying to make these things happen.
Speaker 2:And I would be absolutely remiss without acknowledging the heroics of my wife, erica Dante, who's stepped up to help me and work through this Certainly donors, supporters and friends. For those interested, I have a GiveSendGo account that can help us stay afloat and it certainly is right. Now I'm asking for one dollar more than what they offered for the lie. I think the truth is worth at least one dollar more than lies and cover up, and I'm happy to talk and share more things of some videos I have of other presidents saying some pretty rough stuff. But in lieu of that, I'll stop sharing for the moment and I will hand it back off to you guys. I know I've talked for a while and I do appreciate your patience. You guys know what it's like to be in my classroom now, where people fall asleep and just hope that I stop.
Speaker 1:I want to thank you for having the courage to put your thoughts together and offer solutions. I'll venture real quick and just to plant a seed, because I think this will be an important part of the Q&A session when we get to it. But your solution is very logical and sound in principle, but in carrying it out we'll have some issues that we'll have to deal with, For instance, eliminating people that are anti-American or whatever. We have to be able to have a way to do that, getting into the same way of acting that we're concerned about. So I just want to plant that seed.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you've demonstrated tremendous courage and you know and you're no lightweight you know the credentials that you have are very, very powerful. The credentials that you have are very, very powerful. So we want to be able to take advantage of your experience, not to exploit you, but to build upon that and to keep moving things in a good direction. So, with that, let me pause the Q&A part so we can hear from our general counsel, the Honorable Mike Rose, because he's dealing with some stuff very directly related to what you've been dealing with, Rick.
Speaker 4:Mike, you're up. Well, hello everybody. I'm going to describe what STARS is doing regarding the harm caused by DEI to members in the military, which is sort of the flip side of the coin that Rick has been describing. He's been describing how DEI is in our institutions and not being eradicated. I'm going to tell you about some of the lasting damage to real human beings that STARS is working to correct.
Speaker 4:I met on August 14th the Undersecretary of Defense, tata, with three West Point graduates in Tata's Pentagon office and afterwards met with Undersecretary of the Air Force, matt Lohmeyer and his acting general counsel and an SES. When I met with Matt Lohmeyer I handed him 15 paperwork about 15 cases of military members being harmed by DEI or the COVID vaccine mandate. Ten were Air Force, three were Navy, one was Army, one was Coast Guard and I described four of those cases. I'm very happy that Undersecretary Lohmeyer has followed up, as he said he would, and I know he has, because last week a GS-14 from the Air Force Board of Correctional Military Records called and emailed six of those 10 Air Force members and the email said she had been instructed by Undersecretary Lohmeyer to work with STARS to, on an expedited basis, have the Air Force Board of Correctional Military Record evaluate how to give remedies to those six people. So I've worked with those six people to submit their narratives and documentary evidence of how they were wronged and let me just give you a couple examples of this. Now most of the people on this call have received a 27-page document that Captain Matt Longo, air Force Captain Matt Longo, an OSI agent, submitted two days ago and it shows an outrageous example of DEI run amok. Captain Longo had received several awards for being such an outstanding OSI Office of Special Investigation officer until he was assigned by orders to serve on a board that would select which ROTC students would be selected to go into the field of OSI.
Speaker 4:He was the only white person in that board. He objected to a black person being selected over a white person because he thought the white person was clearly more qualified. He lost that. The selection was made on the basis of skin color and gender. The selections and he was denigrated, called racist, created a toxic environment and suddenly his career all went downhill. He was removed from command and I'm not exaggerating this. He's been at home in Missouri for over a year collecting pay, doing nothing. Been at home in Missouri for over a year collecting pay, doing nothing. I've never heard of a military member being punished by being sent home with pay for any period of time, much less over a year. So he's filed congressional complaints Article 138 complaints Inspector General complaints and I urge everybody on this call to read his narrative. It's lengthy but the feedback I get from people reading it, including some in his calls just how outrageous his treatment and how blatant the OSI ideology ruined his career to this point.
Speaker 4:Now another case that's going to be submitted today is Brigadier General Melissa Cunningham. She is an Air Force Academy graduate. She refused to take the COVID vaccine because of medical and religious objections. She was given a choice of being court-martialed taking a COVID vaccine or resigning. She resigned and she wants to go back into the military, or resigning. She resigned and she wants to go back into the military, and I think she it would be in the interest of the Air Force in our country clearly to get her back in Now.
Speaker 4:Today a Lieutenant General, paul Carlton, former Surgeon General of the Air Force, is going to be interviewing, at my instigation, an Air Force Captain, brittany Justice. Brittany Justice is an electrical engineer for the Air Force who refused to take the COVID vaccine because of religious objections. Well, the Air Force's tactic with her is to send her to mental health clinics and they concluded she was delusional. So now they're processing her out and this former Surgeon General of the Air Force tells me in the seven commands he's had he's never sent anybody to a mental health clinic. But it's clear to me that in some of our cases the mental health clinics or psychiatrists, but basically if they can't find a criminal conduct or misconduct by the person they're trying to get rid of, a fallback position is to send them to some mental health professional that will say there's something wrong with them.
Speaker 4:We have an Air Force chaplain who became a whistleblower about fraud. He's a West Point graduate. They drummed him out. We found out last week that Major Brennan Shilliport actually won his case. And finally, I'll tell you about an Air Force Academy senior who won his case last week. An Air Force Academy senior who won his case last week where he was not going to be allowed to get his bachelor of science degree even though he completed all the academic requirements. His problem was not DEI, it was really just a screwed up disciplinary system. But through STARS help he now is getting his degree and he is now saying he's going to look into with cadets at the academy, to creating a Turning Point USA chapter at the Air Force Academy.
Speaker 4:Now, finally, stars has what we call a Operation, rescue and Restore proposal. We have over 170 cases like the ones you've just heard of people who have gone to Matt Lohmeyer's website or the STARS website asking for help, and those cases come to be and I triage them. A certain percent we can't help or shouldn't help. But most of them deserve help and some of them need immediate help. And now I'm very happy we got a pipeline to Matt Lohmeyer. I can email him on even his private email. But we have cases that I've sent to Matt from the Army, coast Guard and Navy that don't have his counterparts approved yet, and I'll just give you two quick examples here.
Speaker 4:A Navy ROTC midshipman at Georgia Tech was removed from his program because he refused to take the COVID vaccine because of religious objections, that is, he had a right to do so. He had to borrow $70,000 to finish his degree at Georgia Tech and he still wants to be a naval officer and a Navy pilot and one part of the Navy sent him a letter saying okay, we accept your application, you can get back in, but another part of the Navy sent him a letter saying he owes $35,000 to compensate for the two years of Navy ROTC that he had and we can't get the two parts of the Navy to agree to forgive the $35,000 and letting him get back in the Navy. It seems to me that somebody at the top levels of the Navy ought to be able to make a couple of calls or send a couple of emails and get that resolved. I had two general officers and two admirals that were retired on more than an hour Zoom call with a Coast Guard former officer candidate named Joshua Rosin. I want to show you how screwed up this DEI is. He's removed the week before he graduates.
Speaker 4:He's at the Coast Guard Academy taking his officer candidate school course for being racist, having made a racist remark. Well, what is his remark? His remark is that a black officer candidate applied to be a rescue swimmer but he couldn't swim and he failed the swim test. So this officer says why in the world would anybody apply to be a rescue swimmer if they can't swim? And that's twisted into saying that black people can't swim. And at the end of this hour conversation, both generals and both admirals said I believe you. This young man was in a suit. It was heartbreaking to hear his angst and agony over this, but we don't have the mechanism in the Coast Guard yet to restore these people. So we're trying to systematize this because, even though STARS has like 170, some cases, I believe there's not only hundreds, there's thousands out there of people still hurting when their careers have been ruined and we're trying, through Operation Rescue and Restore, to basically the reason I have these generals and admirals interview the people is just to determine whether they'll write a letter saying I interviewed this person and I think that it would be in the best interest of the military in a country to let them resume their career.
Speaker 4:One last thing I would say Lieutenant General Mike Flynn and an Army colonel both wrote a one-page recommendation of an Army enlisted man who had been removed the day before graduation at Fort Carson not Fort Carson, fort Jackson here in Columbia, south Carolina, when they saw a picture of President Trump on his cell phone picture. And next thing, you know, a bunch of people black people above him and so forth are accusing him of saying this and saying that and in the end, you can't prove it. He said. She said so you really can't prove what happened. But this guy persisted. He even had a congressman from Arizona go to Fort Jackson and meet with a major general in charge. He's very competent and it was announced about two weeks ago he'll be allowed to come back into the Army. Actually, we're very lucky that these people want to come back into the Army or the military, depending on their branch.
Speaker 4:Now, very briefly, let me tell you and by the way I've been asked well, why do you work so hard on these cases? But let me draw an analogy. Some of you have seen the movie Hacksaw Ridge. Hacksaw Ridge and I saw an interview of the real Desmond Doss Medal of Honor winner, who is a conscientious objector enlisted and he was a medic and he rescued 70 people or so from the top in a battle in Okinawa of Hacksaw Ridge and he was wounded himself but he lowered people down this cliff and rescued these people, cliffed and rescued these people, and I saw him on the real documentary asked what kept you going? And he said all I did is. I kept saying Lord, please help me save one more, lord, please help me save one more. So now, if you're in front of, if you see somebody about to be run over in a truck and you don't push them out of the way. It's immoral. I see these people getting screwed and I see a path to getting the situation reversed in their favor, so that's what motivates me and the other people in the stars to keep going here. I told this Brigadier General, melissa Cunningham, yesterday thank you for doing this, melissa, you don't have to go back to the military, but the country needs you, the Air Force needs you, and that's true.
Speaker 4:Now, the last thing I'd like to say that Rick may be interested, since we're talking about boards and academia. There's a ideological battle going on, basically at the Air Force Academy Association of Graduates Board of Directors. General Bishop, who's on this call, and four others got elected by referendum to the board of directors of the Air Force Academy Alumni Association and three incumbents who ran for reelection all got defeated. So the people that elected the new people wanted a new direction, a new reform, and we knew it was transparency and accountability and and a couple other things. So I've attended, with those five new people, two board of directors meetings and it's I can just tell you it's very toxic. It's like saltwater hitting freshwater or freshwater hitting saltwater, and even one of the board members I'm just in the back minding my own business taking notes and one of the board members at both meetings took an on-the-record swipe at me which I couldn't respond to because I'm not on the board. But the point is not me.
Speaker 4:What I want to say is that a break of the husband, retired Air Force colonel of the chairwoman of the board went up to General Bishop, called him a racist and demanded he resign from the board, and then went to General Mookie Walker as you can see on this is black and said he was racist and you guys on the Unity Five represent Trump extremists and demanded that he resign. And that was one of these. There's three witnesses that have written memos for the record, and one incident was in front of the chairwoman. So what would you do if your spouse and you were chair of some board like this, did something like that? I don't know about you, but I would disassociate myself from it. I would disavow and say I'm not responsible for what my spouse did, but I apologize for it. Not a word, not a comment, not an apology. And who would presume to walk up and say two people that have just been elected by overwhelming percentages of those who voted to say that they're racist and they should demand to resign. So that's the environment here. And I guess, the last thing I'd like to say. There is now a movement to make Charlie Kirk either an honorary member of the AOC or to create a new category, sort of like the Medal of Freedom is given by President Trump to civilians, medal of Honor is given to military, so we can create a new category of once a year award or acknowledgement to somebody who's no longer with us, who has contributed a lot to our country and the Air Force. So, and, by the way, that's going to be opposed too.
Speaker 4:One last thing I want to say on this board. I can barely contain my laughter at this, but when these five new people were elected and the three who ran for re-election defeated, there was about a two-month gap of lame duckness before the new people officially became members. During that two-month period, the lame duck board appointed two new voting members, two new voting members. So, lo and behold, when the new five came in and the three old came out, this woman, whose husband accosted General Bishop and General Walker, was elected by two votes. Which two votes? The two they appointed? Now this would be like Trump and a Republican Congress being elected last November, but during the lame duck period, the Democrat Congress created two new a bunch of new congressional positions and appointed them as Democrats, so that, once the new Congress went in, the Democrats would be in control. How absurd is that? And so that's just the kind of changes that the new group's trying to implement. Okay, I'm done with my comments. Turn it back to you, ron.
Speaker 1:All right, Mike. Thanks for that update. As you can see by the volume of material that Mike presented, he doesn't need to sleep like the rest of us, so he is an energizer rabbit. So with that, let's open it up to questions for our speaker, Dr Rick Adante or Mike. So raise your hand. If you want to ask a question or make an observation, Go ahead, David.
Speaker 9:Hi, rick, it's nice to meet you. I'm a fellow academic as well and I'm on the inside for 22 years now I speak out here in Georgia. I won't mention my employer. You can find it online. But you're right, everything is hidden from the public. We have a board of regents that are appointed by the governor. They're all Republican on paper. They're all conservative on paper. I've had meetings with many of them. Sonny Perdue is our chancellor. He refuses to meet with me. So you can maybe turn Georgia into the national example of a wolf in sheep's clothing, so to speak, because if they're not willing to do that, nothing's going to happen. People are policy. A policy written on paper doesn't really help anything. We've got to get these people off the payroll.
Speaker 1:Great Thanks, Dr Bray. Any other questions or observations? While we're waiting, I have to tell you that the mental health matter that Rick talked about ought to be extremely disturbing to all of us. In the American Creed presentation that we've been giving, General Arbuckle added a slide that talks about the 45 goals that the Communist Party advanced in America in 1963. 1963, one of those 45 goals talked about using the mental health industry to help in indoctrinating Americans. Talked about using the mental health industry to help in indoctrinating Americans. That was in 1963. And so we see that they've gone a long way to fulfilling that particular goal in America. Any other questions or observations.
Speaker 2:Does anybody want to see a video of a university president that has not been released public talking about how he thinks the Trump administration are white supremacists?
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you've got it available. How long is it, Rick?
Speaker 2:It's about a minute or so, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, get ready to show that. Meanwhile we got Al Palmer with a hand up Go ahead Al. Go ahead, al, you're muted.
Speaker 7:Yeah, somebody muted me. I wonder who that could have been. Concerning funding, and a lot of the argument has been with universities, particularly in getting federal grants from the government, that they somehow control that, that they do that, that it's their obligation and their right to get it. Well, that's not true. That's a gift from Congress and the people of the country. And each of those grants because I've had one of those before, a major one running a museum you get a contracting officer who's going to be on your back. There's a lot of things that they will look at and that's a place. If anybody sees something is wrong can go to that contracting officer. It doesn't have to be a part of that organization and that can be brought up.
Speaker 7:And that may be one avenue to go after some of this work we're talking about, with DEI being obstructed Because from the federal contracting officer's standpoint, there's been a rule or a law violated run by the United States, and I think that's one of the things you might want to try to get to. And the other thing I'd offer is, as a solution to the bad rot that's happened with disrespecting the country and particularly the things in the military, I think we ought to start telling the stories of the people who have been in the military, who are the true heroes, who have sacrificed. There's not much of that. Everybody says thank you for your service. And yeah, we know, people sacrifice. They don't know exactly how, they don't know why and they don't know about what it's taken for those people to serve their country in combat where their lives are at stake. And I think we can do more of that. That's my two cents.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great point, Al. You know we keep talking about competing narratives. We've got a good one to tell and it's all based on truth, and justice and the American creed, and so the more we can tell that story. You know, that's one way I think we can battle this. We can tell that story. You know, that's one way I think we can battle this. So, admiral, if you hold your thought here just for a second, let's tee up the video that Rick is talking about and then we'll come back to Admiral Rodriguez. So you're cleared. Hot, rick.
Speaker 2:Okay, let me give this a go here and slideshow so. So here's a president from Cal State, dominguez Hills, and he's saying the Trump administration tries to feel good about themselves by denigrating other people. You can see where residuals of white supremacy and racism come in if you understand that racist ideology is all about.
Speaker 5:Could you provide?
Speaker 3:some concrete examples of how a therapist could help a client identify the impact of residual white supremacy. And with that I'm going to add in a. So what allows you to be able to engage in that space? What allows you to treat other members of the human family in the derogatory ways that you do? Because there's an assumption that design the ideas of the substance of behavior.
Speaker 3:There are assumptions in people's head that they make about the way in which they treat folk. So part of providing that level of insight right and, and the next one they do is there everybody knew this current federal administration was not liking black folk, was not liking Latino folk and was not down with immigrants. Everybody knew that.
Speaker 2:And so I will stop sharing. That's a little bit of a snapshot there. I hope I've passed that back over to you, but you know that's somebody who's determining the pedagogical and instructional direction of an entire institution that has a website that boasts how proud they are of their ROTC unit at Cal State, Dominguez Hills. That happened just a few week and a half ago. I was on that call. That was like this they said this is publicly available, We'll share this. So they're free recording and they're not trying to hide it. It's just you don't often see it and I mean I guess it's for other funding agencies to determine if that's the kind of policy and viewpoint that we want leading the instruction of our personnel being trained to be leaders and officers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, very, very dangerous. Thanks, Rick. And after this call we'll get together with you. We're probably going to recommend to the board of directors of adding you to our board of advisors and I'm going to link you up with Sam Thiessen, our VP for education, and John Brockman, who heads up our Chairman's Group, which is our internal think tank, to see how we can take advantage of the extra time you have between employment positions to advance our story. So with that, Admiral Rodriguez, over to you, sir.
Speaker 11:Thank you, ron, and appreciate it. And a great suggestion to bring Rick on to our board of advisors. Rick, you're spot on and I really admire your energy and what you've gone through. Service that promote DEI. I know this from personal experience. There's one for women, the Sea Service Leadership Association. There's one for African Americans, the National Naval Officers Association, and there's one for Hispanic Americans of Hispanic descent pardon my, because there's no such thing as a hyphenated American called the Association of Naval Services Officers. This cuts across all three sea services the Navy, marine Corps and Coast Guard.
Speaker 11:When I made flag, I was ordered by the CNO to get involved by virtue of my last name, and for 27, 28 years prior to that, I tried to avoid all that mess, and so I did become the president of the Association of Naval Services Officers, and for the eight years I was national president, I tried to promote meritocracy, and meritocracy only, and I even went to a point where I was strongly recommending to the three service chiefs the Commandant of Coast Guard, commandant of Marine Corps and the Chief of Naval Operations to get rid of these organizations, because they were doing nothing more than creating or widening the chasm between races and between ethnicities, and so forth and so on, but they still exist.
Speaker 11:And after Secretary of Defense, now Secretary of War, pete Hegseth, announced that DEI is dead, the CNO, admiral Franchetti, who is no longer CNO, thank goodness put a Band-Aid over this and canceled the memorandums of understanding there wasn't an existing memorandum of understanding between the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard with these three affinity groups and canceled those MOUs just to the point where the sea services would not support the organization but still encourage these organizations to exist in the name of DEI and not meritocracy per se.
Speaker 11:And that just it's irritating as all get out. I don't know how to get rid of these nonprofit organizations because they are nonprofit, they're independent of the Department of Defense, department of War, and I'm not sure how we can go forward. There's also another organization that I completely and I wrote an op-ed about a year and a half, two years ago with the Hispanic Veteran Leadership Association, which has in its membership AOG members from the Air Force Academy, but we'll get onto that later. But we need to get rid of these organizations and I'm not sure how to do that and I think STARS is on the right path, but we really need to dig deep and dig out these roots of DEI and get rid of them.
Speaker 2:I think that's a great point and, you know, the thing I would add to it is kind of the first comment that was made right when I finished right, which is that a lot of what I tried to share was sort of two sides of a coin One, the nitty gritty of what's actually really truly happening, but also the big picture view of like how you know and I and I think what you're saying is is absolutely true like the big picture view is is it's important to have the kind of whole view of the battlefield but like, actually implementing hill by hill, taking each hill by hill, is going to be a really tough thing, because some is really entrenched and I think that the way that that's going to have to be approached is absolutely in unconventional ways that we've traditionally seen it approached.
Speaker 2:I think, again, this designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization is a really good example of that, because it's a creative, unconventional way to levy the new levels of tools available towards approaching it's the same overlapping Vendira, the people advancing Antifa, or Hamas or terrorism are the same people taught and bred through the seed of DEI and so you can attack one.
Speaker 2:Those overlapping Venn diagrams really work well, because I mean, you know I'm no lawyer, but I mean you can go after their financing, their 501c status, their tax approach status. Every university in the country has an Antifa student group and if that's now considered a terrorist organization, then every university can be considered potentially a terrorist cell. Withhold all funding, almost as a voice of at least understanding, if not compassion, to the people who might look at things in the opposite way than we're discussing, which is that I think that psychologically, even you know, they've kind of been raised their entire life with the framework of thinking that this is proper and good and moral to do. For you know, oftentimes, and sometimes it's just a cudgel for them to, you know, bully a communist takeover, but some people they really think so, and so I think that, like even just the Supreme Court's overturning of affirmative action was only 12, 18 months ago.
Speaker 2:This is a really new psychological thing for people to kind of wrap their head around and that might take time, that might take sort of winning a hearts and minds approach. But I'm not willing to hold back the train of progress while we wait for the hearts and minds to get on board, because our country can't afford for us to wait Right.
Speaker 11:Right, and you got a good point there. I didn't even think about maybe attacking them from a 501c3 perspective, canceling their 501c3 status. These three affinity groups are pushing 50 years. They're well ingrained. I mean, they came out of the Vietnam era for those of us who joined right after that and we were invited to go to all these training sessions. But anyway, be that as it may, I think that might be a good avenue is approach it through IRS, but that's going to take some legal things. Well, anyway, thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, great, great discussion and it really drives home that we may be at a point where we have to update definitions that are consistent with the American creed, that are consistent with the American creed, the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the additional civil liberties that were expanded in the Bill of Rights in a system of self-governance codified in our Constitution. So we have to approach this very, very legally and ethically. And as one of the developments that hopefully will shine a light on some possibilities, my classmate, eric Vogel, did a book review on a book published by a couple of West. Given current definitions you can't really definitively establish treason, but the intent, the behaviors, are certainly treasonous in principle. To do a comparative analysis on that book with a book that came out in 1999 and General Arbuckle, our vice chair, has introduced this into our Creed presentation A book published by two colonels in the People's Liberation Army called Unrestricted Warfare, and so their whole intent is to defeat the United States without using military force, and a lot of those actions are underway right now as we speak in America.
Speaker 1:So we're starting to shine a light on it. The challenge we have is to be able to address it legally and ethically and consistent with our constitutional principles. So with that we've got a couple of hands up Chip, and then Mike.
Speaker 10:Thank you, colonel Scott. I have a quick question for Dr Adante, and obviously the way to solve this is with our kids and education. I think it begins at K through 12. But my question for you is how do we change the faculties at our colleges so they embrace American values? That's my question for you. Do you have a suggestion? And then the second one for Colonel Rose, with the Restore Project, do you have any attorneys helping you pro bono on any of these cases, or what can we do to expand that part of the operation? Thanks a lot. I appreciate the time.
Speaker 2:Hi, thank you. That's those are. That's a tough question, I. I mean, I think the simplest answer is we don't have the manpower to simply replace everyone ideologically, so to speak, and I think that there'd be problems with that potentially. Anyways, in some, in other respects at it, you could think, might be that you know you're addressing almost what becomes an academic, legal kind of like, debate of like. To what extent can you, should you and could you kind of like handle, you know, the ideological belief systems of people, teaching with, balancing with academic freedom, free speech, which are all very valuable things? I mean, it's a really good question you have, sir, because it's a tough one and you know it goes back to this sort of creative approach.
Speaker 2:I think we were just discussing earlier that. I think we're in kind of a new era. That's a little bit different than how things have been approached in the past, which is to say, you know, if we're going to pay, you, let's say and I think this is why I looked at this through like the lens of the DOD or the Department of War, which is that, like this is not just civilian students who are free to take their money and go to another university if they don't like what they're being taught, so to speak, so to speak in like a free market approach. But if this is DOD personnel that are considered property of the DOD, the citizens have an interest and the DOD has an interest in what they're being taught. And so perhaps an avenue might be explored to say, if you're going to take our federal funding, particularly DOD funding, through the GI Bill or ROTC or DARPA or you know whatever mechanisms those funds are administered through, then you can say and think whatever, of course, you want in a free speech, free society. But you can't teach people to hate the country they're sworn to defend. You can't.
Speaker 2:I think that there can be an argument made that you can reasonably impose some boundaries that shall not be crossed. If you're going to take this funding for people who are training to defend this nation, they have to be taught the true things, which means you can't teach critical race theory because it teaches false american history. So I I think it's fair to say you can teach full academic freedom, free speech, say and think whatever you want, but it's got to be true, like, like. You can teach full academic freedom, free speech, say and think whatever you want, but it's got to be true, like like you can't just defame people. That's illegal, you get defamation, it has to be true.
Speaker 2:You can say if they're a dirtbag, you can say they're a dirtbag, it's true, right, but it has to be true. So I think that there might be a pathway that could be explored of holding content and teachers accountable in a to the truth. But it's going to take some newer approaches to litigating, I think, than what we've seen in the past. But that's just my non-legal approach. I'll leave it to Mr Rose.
Speaker 1:No great great thoughts. Thanks, rick. Yeah, we got three more hands up Mike, jim and then Lola. Go ahead, mike.
Speaker 4:Okay, I have two comments. One is about affinity groups that Admiral Rodriguez referenced. Now I like Alan Dershowitz's shoe on the other foot test. So to test whether or not what you're doing is proper, ethical, maybe even legal, you ask whether the other side could do the same thing. So if we're going to have affinity groups, like at a service academy, based on skin color black why can't you have white? And if you have it based on gender, like for gays, why can't you have for straights? And of course you can't so politically. So I think that eradication of these affinity groups should start at the most effective and easy way to do it is to start at the service academies and start at the officer training schools. I think I read that West Point abolished affinity groups. We have affinity groups at the Association of Graduates, but we can never have a white affinity group, we can never have a straight affinity group. So what winds up happening is young people get ingrained in their training by their training to have divided loyalty loyalty to their affinity group, not just to what unites us or is supposed to unite us, as a member of, say, the Air Force.
Speaker 4:Now my second comment is about the question do I work with other lawyers. Yes, I do work with other lawyers, but not enough, and we're constantly looking for new lawyers, additional lawyers, to work these cases. There are people, there are cases that need to be worked now. If you know anybody who might want to help, please inform me. But we're short, and not only that. It's like Dr Adante said there's not enough people to fill positions.
Speaker 4:Even the head of the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department I saw her being interviewed. There were like 200 lawyers or something of that scale quit when she announced the first day that she took over that our agenda is to fulfill President Trump's agenda and if you're on the Civil Rights Division as an employee can't do that. You need to leave, and they did. So she's short, she's got all this stuff to do and they're so short. She basically said if you've got a lawyer that's interested in this, they don't have to have a background, just let them apply and if we select them, we'll train them. So we just have to fight the battle with what we have and where we are, and that's what we're doing.
Speaker 1:Great Thanks, Mike.
Speaker 6:Okay, Jim, you're up. Yes, Dr Adante, I'd really thank you for your service, really, Really it's service. Now, these comments are mostly about education. First, Dr Dante, I hope you are already in contact with Dr Stanley Ridgely, who wrote both these two great books, Brutal Minds, and he's recently come out with another about DEI. It probably meshes with everything that you're saying and everything that you've experienced.
Speaker 6:Now we talk about universities. I think the universities were kind of like in the center of the whole system. They crank out K-12 teachers, who then join the unions, who go back to the young kids and soften them up. So by the time they hit the universities, they're in classes that are taught by professors who are even farther, just slightly farther left than the ones who hired them. And that's been going on since about 1965 or 1968, when I started watching it. Then the universities crank out the liberal arts and those people write the scripts and write the books, write the scripts for Hollywood movies, write the scripts for the mainstream news, corporate news, which has turned on us. The only thing they left alone was some of the STEM people, but even then, DEI has invaded STEM as well. But that's not the thing. I think we should skate to where the puck's going to be, not to where the puck is right now.
Speaker 6:All of education is changing. Artificial intelligence and these computer networks are helping to do that. So soon, and not all of the new AI tutors are going to be controlled by big tech there will be plenty that will be independent. So I already have friends who tutor. They homeschool their three toddlers, so there's going to be.
Speaker 6:It's much, much easier for parents to get their educational material and, quite frankly, they can teach in two days of a week. What a normal school with all its discipline problems, what a normal public school, could teach in five days. And those kids will be well prepared when they're adults. So with tutors through the machines and with new education systems, these brick and mortar schools are not going to have the same kind of I don't know what the actual word is the stamp that we wanted. We wanted the sheepskin from those things. But soon there are already certification organizations and things like that tests that independently will show education is improving. So I'm optimistic in the long run and pessimistic in the short run because of what you've discovered, and I'll send you some of these hints later on, just in case. But already you're going in the right direction, so thanks.
Speaker 1:Hey Jim, your Wayne Gretzky puck analogy is awesome. Thanks for injecting that. Ski puck analogy is awesome. Thanks for injecting that, dr Adante. Anything to respond to Jim?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you made some really great points and it made me think of a couple things. One I think that one thing that we haven't done very good of as a nation is thinking of civilian positions as service positions, and I think that's led to an absolute hollowing out of academia that has left only a single ideology that has looked at it as service. They've had a great sort of team mindset where a lot of people you know think of like well, I'd rather go make money in industry, or the same reason they don't want to go and work in federal government in DC or anything it's like like it's not that attractive, like they want to go do something else or make more money or do something else if they're talented, because they can, and I think that they don't. It hasn't always been approached as a service position where the left has always kind of looked at themselves as social soldiers doing a duty and standing a post, and because of that they've held a very well carved position now that we've kind of abandoned in some respects.
Speaker 2:So I think that's a useful way to start taking some steps forward is sometimes adopting that point of view whether it's a lawyer offering to serve in the DOJ, where that you know, like that's a service position that the country needs. But I think the other side is like when we've seen this rise over the last 25 years and say the DEI's implementation. One thing that I think has been a trap as well has been looking at things with too much of credentialism. So we'll promote the people in all of our organizations military, civilian, government that might have the best looking resume, but that all that essentially translates to, if you think about it, is they're the most indoctrinated. They may not even know that, they believe it, but they've been in the system with the most credentials. I have a lot of credentials too.
Speaker 2:So like, and what has happened, if you think about the actual sort of math equation, is in order for those DEI kind of policies to have been brutally enforced and implemented over the last 20 some odd years, there has been so much talent that has been overlooked and not pushed forward and they're actually not going to have the same looking credentials on paper.
Speaker 2:But that might be an opportunity to do what Lincoln did and hire Ulysses S Grant out of his mainstay line of generals, and that could be a pathway forward. And the last thing that I'll add before shutting up for the next person here is this idea that if we do need to start replacing positions and I've advocated replacing boards of trustees and things like that they're trustees we can think of other people to mandate through the cudgel of federal funding threats that says you know what we're going to put some take moms for liberty or retired military people, but or or but somebody we're going to trust as trustees to sit on these boards. It's a we don't, it's a manpower issue. We don't have a lot of it, but we can. We have to think creatively about who can we staff and put into these positions to actually be trustees, to re-guide a centering towards a healthy balance, for lack of a thing.
Speaker 1:Rick, that's awesome. You know, building on the Wayne Gretzky skate to where the puck will be. The future is ripe for innovation. The future is ripe for innovation and we're gathering the right minds and right people with the courage and the experience and the insights. I think they can offer some very prudent vectors for the future. So with that, two more questions, and then I'm going to ask General Bishop to wrap it up.
Speaker 12:Lola, you're up. I guess I unmute myself. Okay, thank you so much, rick. I'm in Florida and I've been working since probably 2015 on a sort of similar issue, but not the same veterans, monuments and memorials. We've discovered that those are sort of a litmus test the canary in the coal mine for whether someone's patriotic and pro-America or if they are Marxist, communist, whatever you want to ism that you got. I've made some great contacts there in that world. Michael Ross, I have some attorneys that might have an interest in working on this, so if we can get connected, I'd like to talk to you about that. But, rick, I've made some contacts also with the Santas appointees in the university system. Have you got any contacts there? May we connect? Is there some help I can provide connecting you to some people who would like to know more about this?
Speaker 2:I don't have contacts, but I'd love to and I'm happy to talk and share for any kind of purpose, to help me sure, of course, who doesn't like to help themselves but to help other people? Share the word. I'll help literally at any level of anything I can help people with. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Well, ron or Michael, someone tell me how I can connect with Michael and also Rick. And then, last thing I just wanted to say everybody on this call and the leaders of this group I'm so thrilled for what you're doing. Leaders of this group, I'm so thrilled for what you're doing and I've heard about what has happened that Rick discussed today and I see it in our history work. We have people at University of South Florida who are actually for destruction of historic sites and just crazy stuff and they've just rebranded. So you know, I have other examples in this other silo as well. So it's what's happening.
Speaker 1:So reach out to us with your questions, ideas and whatever, and we'll follow up with that. If stars can't take it on directly, we'll hand you off to other groups or individuals that we think might be in a position to advance your thinking there. So, dave, you're up.
Speaker 13:Just quickly. Mike mentioned a little while ago that West Point had announced that they had eliminated their affinity groups and yes, they did announce that. There's some doubt that they actually did it. There was a leadership conference a couple of months ago that consisted of class presidents and presidents of parents groups and West Point societies around the country and our class president reported to us that the superintendent announced that they were looking at those affinity groups and how they might be redefined, reconstituted that would be compliant with the direction coming out of DOD. Those groups used to be readily findable, I guess searchable on the academy's website. They no longer are. I went looking for them a couple of weeks ago, so there is nothing left there currently. But kind of what I see going on in the background is, even if they're not publicized, they're going to be reconstituted. So just my observation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great. Yeah, these are the types of things we've got to keep our eye on, Dr Adante. Any other thoughts before I hand it over to General Bishop?
Speaker 2:No sir, um, no sir, other than just raw gratitude for everyone in this group and the deep thanks for your time and patience and and support of all this before I even showed up on the scene.
Speaker 2:You guys have been absolute champions, leading this forward. And I spoke with you know I have a handful of friends of mine who are in or have served in the military and one of the things I told them not too long ago about being excited about seeing and learning about you guys and everything you've done and accomplished and are continuing to champion forward is that I said you know it may indeed end up being that it's the military heroes who end up saving the civilian side of this country. You know you can't have a military without a civilian side and you can't have a civilian side without the military protecting them. But it may be the courage and the integrity of the military heroes like you guys who end up, you know, being the leverage point that pivots civilian society to be saved as well. And so deep, deep thanks and gratitude for me for all that you've all done.
Speaker 1:Great Thanks, dr Adante. Welcome to the fight With that General Bishop over to you, sir. So with that General Bishop over to you, sir.
Speaker 5:Thanks very much, ron. I'd like to close with a moment of silence for someone that Dr Adante mentioned several times, our good friend Charlie Kirk. But before I do that, I'd be remiss if I didn't thank all of you for attending today Great discussions. Didn't thank all of you for attending today Great discussions, and certainly to you, rick. You know our raw appreciation for you and telling the story and the courage that you had. And I'd like to particularly just call out two things the recognition of your spouse those of us who have been in this battle for five years would say the same thing that you said we couldn't do it without them, no question. And then also, to echo what Admiral Rodriguez said, spot on. I mean, I don't know if you got the Trojan horse from Mostert, if you came to the same conclusion, but we've been using that visual for years, along with gee. I think the first time I ever saw diversity is not our greatest strength. Unity is our greatest strength, made all the more diverse by the fact that, or made all the more greater because we're a diverse country, is in an email exchange between myself and our former superintendent. So great message. Thank you for your courage. So to turn just for a second to someone who made the ultimate sacrifice and the courage that he showed. Charlie's death last week has hit the Stars team hard. There is no question and I'm going to give you a minute of history as to why that is.
Speaker 5:Some of you on this Zoom have been with us since our inception, so you know. The genesis of this organization was a Black Lives Matter video put together by our football coaches and, despite conversations that I had with the superintendent who had worked for me when he was a colonel, to please take this video down, it's going to be divisive. Have you been to the Black Lives Matter website? Can't you see that they're anti-family? Can't you see that they're anti-capitalism? Can't you see that they're Marxist? You know we never got the video down. Under his tenure the video down, uh, under his tenure, our general counsel, mike rose, wrote a 29 page outstanding ig complaint. Certainly our government, the military, would see that chanting black lives matter seven times in a three-minute video is politics. It's political, it's expousing, you know, using the slogan of an organization that's told us is Marxist. It broke so many DODIs, so many Air Force regulations and instructions, but yet two days after President Biden was elected, we get a one word or one sentence, your IG complaint is dismissed.
Speaker 5:So we came up with the idea right after that. Well, let's, let's go to our board of trustees, our board of visitors. Certainly, if we educate them, they can start to provide the oversight. And Mike and I, in particular, spent the months of November and December of 2020 and January of 2021. Mike even went and stayed overnight with one of our newly appointed board of members spinning them up on what was happening so we could get this critical race theory, dbi, you know, expunged from our alma mater. I think everybody knows what happens President Biden comes into office in January of 2021. And two weeks later the boards of visitors were suspended and then the Trump appointees were fired.
Speaker 5:So with this new election, you know, we tried it once before, let's try it again. And we specifically looked and followed closely who the board of visitors members were going to be of our alma mater. We know people at West Point and the MacArthur Society were doing the same thing and the same with the Calvert Task Group at the Newark. We targeted four people in particular, because one I don't think Stoli's on here, but Stoli is really who's on our Board of Visitors, is kind of also an honorary member of the STARS Board of Advisors. But we targeted Dan Clark, who's one of the most renowned motivational speakers in our country and the world. We targeted Congressman Crank who owns the Air Force Academy. That district of Colorado belongs to him. And we targeted Congressman Pfluger because he's a grad and he's now chairman of the board of the visitors. And of course, we targeted Charlie Crook. We had an hour long Zoom hour long plus Zoom with Charlie in November. He let us speak for over an hour about what we were seeing and I walked away from that Zoom with just such great confidence that we had such a strong voice that was going to speak on our behalf.
Speaker 5:I drove down from where I am where I spend the summer up here in Breckenridge down to the Board of Visitors meeting on the 7th of August, met with Charlie beforehand, told him how much we appreciated him taking the time of what he was doing worldwide to help our alma mater. You know he had just had the biggest smile. One of the things he did at the end of the Zoom was he said let's set up a signal chat. I don't want people reading our emails. So we exchanged a number of signal chats back and forth here and there.
Speaker 5:And then, as the Board of Vis visitors meeting convened, dr Scott and I sat right behind Charlie and you know the signal chat was still going strong and General Bauerfein was asked a question about DEI and CRT and he went through all the steps of things that he had done to eliminate DEI. And I signal chatted Charlie at the time. I said General Bauerfein has done a good job of eliminating DEI from our institution. The question is one for the future what are they doing to make sure it's eradicated? And you know this is an ad lib here, but to quote our former vice president, now the undersecretary of the Air Force, to make sure this monster never raises its head again. Charlie Signall chatted back, I got it and this is what he said at the board of visitors meeting.
Speaker 5:The importance of this institution goes back to one other thing I know the board wants to focus on and that is we're educating them. We need to educate them towards being something, towards being a warrior, but for what? It's one thing to strip away DEI and critical race theory, and he stopped and he looked at General Barenfein, of which we're going to continually politely be bothering you about with questions, but we also want to make sure that cadets, over the course of four years, can articulate, and they can feel in their soul the American exceptionalism. What are they willing to die for? What is that constitution that they are swearing an oath to? It shouldn't just be there's American history. We want them to be on fire because good leaders can articulate the why. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you again for attending. Those are the words of a strong voice that we no longer have with us. I would ask us to close this session with a moment of silence in Charlie's memory. Thank you everyone for attending. We'll look forward to seeing you in the next town hall. Thank you.