Donald Trump the Megathread part II - Mod Warning added to OP 10/1/26

I note that you have not addressed the root question I posed and repeat again: What policies, rules, regulations etc are no longer in place which were in place six months ago which have a practical effect upon my formation?

To address this. As noted in the document you linked, one of the primary goals of this policy relates to manning.

Key Tasks: The following tasks will ensure that all Army policies and strategic plans
incorporate the need to Acquire, Develop, Employ, and Retain individuals through
career progression and assignment selection. It will enable the establishment and
sustainment of cohesive teams comprised of individuals with diverse Knowledge, Skills,
Behaviors, and Preferences (KSB-Ps) and backgrounds to change Army culture toward
a positive and inclusive environment.

Task 7.1.a. Develop and implement mechanisms to integrate and synergize diversity
outreach and goals with Army recruitment strategies to enhance leader participation in
acquiring the best talent from diverse backgrounds.

This cuts to one of the most damaging impacts from Hegseth's policies. He is deliberately looking to create a culture that denigrates anyone who isn't a white, christian man. At a time when the military faces existential issues with recruitment, how is "Lethality" improved by this. Telling women and minorities that they aren't valued, and the military doesn't want them.

Objective End State: The Army sustains Army-wide listening sessions gaining direct
feedback on the success of current programs and initiatives while simultaneously
providing Soldiers and DA Civilians a mechanism to identify potential issues. The
feedback will enable the Army to remain flexible and competitive in acquiring and
retaining twenty-first century talent and demonstrate growth in expanding DEIA
principles across the Total Force.

Key Tasks: The following tasks will enable the Army to establish a cultural baseline and
show positive growth over time in Army policies on the recruitment and retention of
individuals.

The rest of the document is framed in the effort to understand the effectiveness of such policies. Choosing to forego engagement with the force, to understand the experiences of service members is certainly not going improve cohesiveness and trust in leadership.

I can’t help whatever inequities, discrimination or harassment women have suffered in the past. What I can affect is I can ensure the men and women (or choose characteristic of choice) under my command are given the opportunities, treatment, and respect that their rank and position merit without regard to their gender, and I have the tools to do it and enforce it. What more do you propose? I don’t want a policy statement about the history of inequity, give me a practical issue going forward which I am missing. It seems to me that the best way to ensure that everyone is treated equally is to, well, treat them equally. Explain to me why this is a bad policy, and what you think I should be doing which I am not.

How effective is your ability to build this culture of respect? You're not present at the squad level in any real sense. You aren't party to the conversations that occur. You aren't there for example when a hispanic soldier has to listen to their Trump supporting platoon sergeant is talking about how great it is that all the illegals are getting kicked out. You aren't seeing the junior enlisted who may be denied opportunities for schooling that would make them competitive for promotion, because there leader doesn't like them based on their ethnicity or gender. You have a very shallow capacity to impact these things, as any leader does. You are one person, in an organisation where it's leader is clearly and purposefully pursuing a policy that elevates white supremacists. He's pushing out experienced leaders and replacing them with sycophants and lickspittles, who will aggressively push his agenda. You can say all the right things, and try to live the example you want to see, but that flies in the face of the culture the SecDef is pushing.

Explain to me why this is a bad policy, and what you think I should be doing which I am not.

Explain how you think it's a good one? DEI is a convenient dog whistle that lets them say N***er with a wink wink to their fellow racists. It's not fooling anyone. What negative impact did these policies bring that getting rid of them is a beneficial outcome. Please explain how you think that lethality has been improved, as Hegseth claims.

Well, I do note that Genocide Watch's most recent report on South Africa dates from 2019, they haven't updated their web page on South Africa since 2021, and they don't have a current alert in place in relation to South Africa. All of this suggests that things may have improved somewhat in South Africa and it may have dropped off the radar of GW as a result.

The issue is topical now because Trump is making claims about genocide in South Africa, and affording it a pre-eminent status; white South Africans are pretty much the only catogory of refugee that is welcome in the US these days. Obviously, the fact that Trump says that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against its white citizens has no probative or evidential value at all; Trump making this claim is not a reason to think that it is actually happening and, on the whole, Trump making claims of this kind is, on balance, more likely to make people sceptical of the idea that white South Africans are the victims of genocide than it is to make them believe it.

It's also problematic because Trump, plainly, is unbothered by genocide. Genocide Watch's reports on, and warnings about, Israel and its actions in Gaza are much more recent, and much more severe, and GW does have a current alert about Israel that is at a higher level than any alert it has ever had about South Africa, but the Trump administration continues to provide unqualified support and assistance to Israel in its actions in Gaza.

So, whatever the reason that Trump is bleating about genocide in South Africa, it will not be because he takes exception to genocide. And this again will make people sceptical that his claims have any truth to them; they will be looking behind those claims to see what Trump's true agenda is.

All of which is most unfortunate for white South Africans, if indeed they are suffering from genocide or persecution. Trump's choice to exploit their situation for whatever depraved purpose he has is likely to make their position worse, not better.

A few points:

• The main point: Any enquiry into whether any, and if so what kind of, oppression, persecution or genocide is being perperated against white South Africans is hampered, not helped, by the cause being taken up and amplified by Donald Trump. I think you and I would probably agree on that — any discourse that involves Trump is automatically toxified and polarised.
• Relatedly, the fact that Trump characterises what is going on as a genocide is . . . unhelpful. If it fall short of a genocide (and, spoiler alert, it will turn out that it probably does) people will assume that Trump is, once again, full of shït and there is nothing to see here. In fact there could be something to see here.
• Does it fall short of genocide? Yes, it does. The highest rating that Genocide Watch ever gave to South Africa was stage 6 ("Polarisation"), in 2019. That's the same rating that they afforded to the UK in 2022. Do you think there was a genocide going on in the UK in 2022? No, me neither.
• But that doesn't mean there is nothing to see here. There may well be racial oppression of some kind — of a very serious kind — going on. Or, there may not.
• South Africa is, and always has been, a violent society with a very high crime rate. I haven't seen anything to suggest that white South Africans are disproportionately the victims of violence or crime. In the Bad Old Days white South Africans were somewhat insulated from the worst impacts of crime and violence because the the resources of the state were, overwhelmingly disproportionately, devoted to protecting whites, and serving the needs of whites. The loss of that kind of privilege can feel, to those who experience it, like discrimination or oppression. But, actually, it isn't. So if we're going to make the case that white South Africans are singled out as the victims of crime and violence, or that the state pays less attention to protecting them than it does to protecting other citizens, it's not enough that white South Africans feel that way. We need to find actual data that compares their experience with that of their non-white citizens, and that confirms those impressions.
• My sense is that a better case for white oppression can be made in relation to land expropriation. South Africa does have quite sweeping laws that allow the government to expropriate land and, reportedly, these are used mainly to expropriate farms. The law itself is racially neutral, but farms are overwhelmingly in white ownership. Hence, these laws tend to affect white citizens more than other citizens. Furthermore, while the default rule is that compensation must be paid when land is expropriated, the laws do allow expropriation without compensation in certain circumstances, so they can be quite severe in their impact.
• But, informed by the Irish precedent, we'd be slow to leap to the conclusion that this amounts to discrimination against white citizens. We have our own history of land expropriation in Ireland, and we generally regard it as a progressive and beneficial policy. It's true that it overwhelmingly impacted Protestants and unionists, but that's because land ownership was overwhelmingly concentrated in Protestant and unionist hands, for historical reasons that we all know. Something similar is at play in South Africa; farmland is concentrated in white ownership, both because of large-scale seizures of land by white poeople that the colonial-era and apartheid-era governments legitimated, and because of apartheid-era laws that were in place for decades that simply banned black people from owning farms. So any attempt to redistribute farmland is going to disproportionately impact white people. That doesn't make it an anti-white measure. The potential for race-based oppression is certainly there but, again, we'd want to look in detail at how the land expropriation laws are operated in practice before we could conclude that race-based oppression is actually happening.