Tom Cotton has claimed that racism in the US military did not exist before Joe Biden was put into power.
When he entered the White House, the Senator made a suggestion that he had questioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first Black American to hold a position, of his authority because of the “woke ideology” in the military.
Tom Cotton is a former Army captain and an alumni of the Ranger School. Cotton told a Senate hearing that he and Dan Crenshaw, another congressman, had received “several hundred whistleblower complaints” from whistleblowers.
He states, “Mr Secretary, we’re hearing reports of plummeting morale, growing mistrust between races and sexes, where none existed six months ago, and unexpected retirements and separations based on these trainings alone.point 308 |
” Cotton says that they are not his exact words, but they are the words of their own troops that are fighting.point 95 | 1
Cotton proceeds to ask Mr. Austin to give him a yes or no answer on whether or not he believed that the US military was a “fundamentally racist organization.” In response, Mr. Austin says that he won’t give him a yes-or-no answer because the answer deserves more than a yes or no.
Austin continues that the military, like any organization, will “have its challenges, but I do not believe it is a fundamentally racist organization.”
Another question was shot at Austin, asking if the military treated individuals differently based on their “sex or the color of their skin.” He repeats again that it deserves than a yes-or-no, stating that their organization intersects with “diversity, equity, and inclusion focus in the military.”
Cotton then told the Defense Secretary that the military has been “one of the institutions in this society where you are most likely to get ahead based on your own performance, on your own merit, irrespective of the color of your skin or where you came from or who your parents were.”
Mr Austin agreed to his comment and says that he is an example of that, but the politician cuts him off yet again to reiterate his point across that the military had not experienced racism before the Biden era.