On 18 & 19 April 2024, the U.S. Naval Academy Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership held the 23rd annual McCain Conference at the U.S. Naval Institute’s Jack C. Taylor Conference Center.

According to USNA, the McCain Conference brings together midshipmen and conference attendees to “explore the topic of character development and assessment relevant to military operations”. The conference was endowed in 2001 through a gift from Mrs. Cindy McCain in honor of her husband, Senator John McCain (USNA class of 1958). The photos show cadets from the Air Force Academy, West Point and the Coast Guard Academy were also in attendance.

The above photo from the event’s photo gallery caught our eye for obvious reasons. Critical Race Theory = Cultural Marxism. Communism/Marxism have no business being discussed at a US military academy unless being taught about the threat of this foreign doctrine.  The photo’s caption reads:

Janel George, Associate Professor at Georgetown Law and founding Director of the Racial Equity in Education Law and Policy Clinic speaks at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership’s 23rd annual McCain Conference held at the U.S. Naval Institute’s Jack C. Taylor Conference Center.

From Georgetown her bio:

Janel George is an Associate Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Racial Equity in Education Law and Policy Clinic (“REEL Policy Clinic”). The Clinic engages law students in legislative lawyering work on behalf of clients to address issues of racial inequality in public education.

Her work and scholarship focus on racial stratification and inequality in U.S. education and legislative and policy interventions to help address it.

She has written about the resegregation of public schools, discriminatory school discipline practices, Critical Race Theory, and resource equity. . . . . (you get the idea)

Her scholarship includes:

“The Myth of Merit: The Fight of The Fairfax County School Board and the New Front of Massive Resistance“

“Stereotype and School Pushout: Race, Gender and Discipline Disparities”

and

A Lesson on Critical Race Theory which starts out:

In September 2020, President Trump issued an executive order excluding from federal contracts any diversity and inclusion training interpreted as containing “Divisive Concepts,” “Race or Sex Stereotyping,” and “Race or Sex Scapegoating.” Among the content considered “divisive” is Critical Race Theory (CRT). In response, the African American Policy Forum, led by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, launched the #TruthBeTold campaign to expose the harm that the order poses. . . .

CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers.

CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others. CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation. . . . .

Re Crenshaw, that would be a professor of law at COLUMBIA University and the editor of these two books that aim to see race in everything. which divides people. Racist indeed:

According to the McCain Conference agenda, Crenshaw was “INVITED”. Why in the world would the Naval Academy think it’s a good idea to invite someone SO politically controversial, are they tone deaf? From the photo gallery of the event, it looks like she wasn’t there but instead Janel George took her place.

Going back to Janel George, who spoke at the US Naval Academy, in January 2024 she wrote an article in Ms. Magazine complaining Harvard President Claudine Gay was ousted not because of plagiarism but only because she’s black. Hugh Fitzgerald dissects her article: Janel George, a Fighter for Truth and Justice: With a particular obsession about ‘white supremacy’ (FrontPage, 8 FEB 24)

It seems to be a severe disservice to the namesake of the Center, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who suffered so much as a Prisoner of War of Communist/Marxist Vietnamese and fought valiantly against them, only to have Communist/Marxist theory being delivered as something normal at a conference run by his Center at the Academy he graduated from. From his bio:

Shot down on September 9, 1965, while on a mission over North Vietnam, Stockdale was taken to Hoa Lo Prison, the “Hanoi Hilton.” His shoulders were wrenched from their sockets, his leg shattered by angry villagers and a torturer, and his back broken. But he refused to capitulate.

Rather than allow himself to be used in a propaganda film, Stockdale smashed his face into a pulp with a mahogany stool. “My only hope was to disfigure myself,” Stockdale wrote in his 1984 autobiography, In Love and War. The ploy worked, but he spent the next two years in leg irons. After Ho Chi Minh’s death, he broke a glass pane in an interrogation room and slashed his wrists until he passed out in his own blood.

His captors then relented in their harsh treatment of him and his fellow prisoners. His efforts to keep the enemy from using him for their purposes won him the Medal of Honor.

As a reminder, over 58,000 American service members were killed fighting Communism/Marxism in the Vietnam War, with many more wounded or missing.

The McCain Conference was entitled, “Liberal Democracy – Challenges, Critics, Solutions“. The United States is not a democracy but a Constitutional Republic, and it’s odd (or purposeful) they would say “Liberal Democracy”. Here’s their lovely main graphic for the presentations:

What would Adm. Stockdale and all he went through, think?

The agenda of the conference shows these speakers, many who have written left-leaning books that consider the MAGA populist movement a threat who are getting their information sources not from the approved state narratives (coming to realize that that state narratives were propaganda lies pushing a left-wing agenda).

KEYNOTE
John Allen – Strategic Advisor, Microsoft; Four-Star General (Ret.), United States Marine Corps; Former Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and US Forces in Afghanistan; Former Special Presidential Envoy, Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State

ECONOMICS

• Maya MacGuineas – President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
• Anne Case – Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University; author of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

POPULISM

• Bill Galston – Ezra K. Zilkha Chair and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institute; author of Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy
• Sheri Berman – Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University; author of Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day

PANEL: IDENTITY

• Kimberlé Crenshaw – Professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School; author of On Intersectionality: Essential Writings [INVITED]
  • Replaced with: Janel George, an Associate Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Racial Equity in Education Law and Policy Clinic
• Yascha Mounk – Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University; author of The Identity Trap

PANEL TECHNOLOGY

• Cass Sunstein – Professor at Harvard Law; author of #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
• Jovana Davidovic – Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Iowa

PANEL – RELIGION

• Chris Eberle, Professor of Philosophy, U.S. Naval Academy; author of Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics
• Kevin Vallier, Director of the Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law, Bowling Green University; author of Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation

PANEL – VIRTUE

• Peter Berkowitz, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; author of Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism
• Yuval Levin, Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; author of A Time to Build: How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream

KEYNOTE – POST-LIBERALISM

• Patrick Deneen – Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame; author of Why Liberalism Failed

KEYNOTE – LIBERALISM’S FUTURE

• Francis Fukuyama – Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; author of Liberalism and Its Discontents

PANEL – RAMIFICATIONS FOR THE MILITARY

• LtCol Eric Scherrer, USMC, Stockdale Center Fellow, US Naval Academy
• CDR (Chaplain) Loren Crone, USN, Associate Director, Stockdale Center, US Naval Academy

WTH happened to our academy?