Exclusive: Joint Special Operations Command Personnel Encouraged to Attend Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Conference

Personnel for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a secretive component of the United States military’s Special Operations Command, are being encouraged to attend virtual conferences on diversity, equity, and inclusion, among other topics considered beneficial for their “professional development,” according to two sources.

Emails obtained by Breitbart News and sent out from JSOC’s Civilian Training Office to JSOC personnel — both civilian and military — in April and May encouraged them to attend the virtual conferences, which would also be broadcast at their compound at Fort Bragg.

One email sent on May 20, 2021, reminded JSOC personnel that they had access to the conferences “at no cost (normally $500 a session per person).”

The email highlighted the three next upcoming conferences, which would be broadcast in a classroom for JSOC personnel — one on “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”; another on “Change & Transformation”; and another on “Emotional Well-Being.”

The conference on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which started on Monday, included panels on:

— Inclusive Leadership for Building Equitable Organizations (featuring professional actors portraying workplace scenarios to “illustrate the responsibility of leaders to mitigate bias and address systemic disparities);

— Psychological Safety & Belonging (the description said: “where people feel free to express who they are, what they believe, and how they feel…”);

— Restorative Justice, Community Trauma, and The Partisan Divide (the description said: “The violent storming of the Capitol on January 6th was just the latest and most extreme example of the division that exists…”);

— Racism, White Supremacy and Anti-Racism (the description said: “Racism is not a new thing but it seems as if recently [it] has gone mainstream. From Meghan Markle on Oprah to the murder of Asian women in Atlanta…”).

The conference on Emotional Well-Being includes an event titled: “Black Emotional Lives Matter: Embedding Diversity and Inclusion in Your Approach to Employee Well-Being.” The description said, “You will hear about issues such as”:

• The impact of secondary trauma and the impact of events such as the murder of George Floyd
• The emotional tax paid by Black employees as they navigate the biases of a white-centric society and have to adapt to fit in with white-dominated work cultures
• The psychic pain caused by microaggressions
• The emotional toll of exclusion

An earlier email sent April 13, 2021, by JSOC’s Civilian Training Office said: 

Participating in professional development courses will expose you to new ideas and perspectives, perhaps some you hadn’t thought of before. A wealth of new knowledge can come from actively participating in professional development courses.

It added: “Add these opportunities to your [Individual Development Plan] and invest time in yourself. These opportunities will help you grow professionally over time and do count towards your continuous learning credit hours.”

The email included another forwarded email from the Pentagon’s Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service (DCPAS) that said, “DOD employees are being afforded an opportunity to attend an array of FREE virtual conferences sponsored by The Conference Board.”

The Conference Board is a global non-profit “business membership and research group organization” described as “a think tank that delivers trusted insights dealing with subjects impacting business and society.” “These insights,” the email said, “are for all grade levels and ranks.”

The DCPAS email added: “We encourage your participation in the attached virtual conferences.”

One source familiar with the emails told Breitbart News that special operations forces are “disappointed that this Marxist crap is impacting the command.”

“[It] has zero impact on winning wars or hiring the best,” the source added.

Kenneth McGraw, spokesman for SOCOM, responded to a query by Breitbart News about the training in a statement:

DoD regularly notifies its employees of a wide-variety of non-mandatory, professional education opportunities, to include the courses you referenced. These courses are not unique to U.S. Special Operations Command or any USSOCOM subordinate command. In this instance, JSOC notified their civilian and military personnel that DoD was offering 17 free, professional-development courses online, one of which is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Employees can decide whether they want to attend any courses or not, to include how many courses and on which subjects. For specifics related to the courses in questions, I would refer you to DoD.

It is not the first time the Pentagon has included special operations forces in its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

SOCOM announced in March it had hired its first diversity chief, only to suspend him weeks later for partisan social media posts, including one comparing former President Donald Trump to a doctored photo of Adolf Hitler.

The diversity training is happening amid a major push by the Biden Pentagon to further diversify the military and “root-out” extremists, despite not having a definition of “extremism” or data on how many extremists are serving in the military.

One of the first actions President Joe Biden took in office was to reverse restrictions on transgender persons serving in the military.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also hired the department’s first senior adviser on diversity and inclusion, Bishop Garrison, and ordered a 60-day period where commanders were to spend a day addressing “extremism” with troops, and stood up a Counter Extremism Working Group to define what “extremism” is and make countering it a permanent and continuous effort.

Some troops have expressed concerns that the push against extremists in the military is really a push to silence conservatives.

“What you see happening in the U.S. military at the moment is that if you’re a conservative, then you’re lumped into a group of people who are labeled extremists if you voice your views,” Air Force Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier said in a May 7 on the podcast Information Operations. Lohmeier was recently fired from his command at Space Force after the interview, in which he warned about Marxism spreading in the military.

Lohmeier, an Air Force Academy graduate, also said diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings in the military are pushing critical race theory that is rooted in Marxism. He went on to say:

The language of the training, which most people don’t understand but I help lay it out in the book, was devised by Marxists. It’s intended to be divisive and yet we spread it about the military services pretending it’s going to unify everyone.

He said Air Force materials given to commanders to conduct the stand-down on extremism with began with a vignette about the January 6 Capitol breach. “That context painted the entire discussion and all the talking points,” he said. He also said all the examples of extremism did not mention riots during summer 2020 but only had to do with:

…various odd examples of white nationalists that had been caught at some point in the last decade and had been punished for it and kicked out of the military, or a radical Islamic terrorist.

To date, only one active duty service member has been charged in relation to the Capitol breach.

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