CHANGE: Top Navy Admiral Quietly Removes ‘Woke’ Books From CNO Reading List.
The US Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Mike Gilday released an update to the CNO Professional Reading Program. Gone from the list are socially progressive books that ignited conservative anger last year. Books like Ibram X. Kendi bestseller How to Be an Antiracist and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
The CNO-Professional Reading Program consists of 12 books and is a mix of writing genres including fiction, non-fiction, military, strategy, management, and technology, among others.
“A learning mindset is essential to accelerating our warfighting advantage,” said Gilday. “A Navy that learns, adapts, and improves the fastest will be the most successful. Knowledge sharing is essential to creating a learning culture.”
Last year Gilday received praise from Democrats and scorn from several Republicans for choosing books that leaned into the question of race in America.
“If you want to understand a country’s military, take a look at what its officer corps is reading,” said Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “So with that in mind, what are American military officers reading these days? Well, let’s see, a sub-literate pamphlet on how the United States is a disgusting immoral country that must be changed immediately and forever.”
“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people,” Milton Friedman once said. “The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”
It appears that the education reforms spearheaded by Governors Youngkin and DeSantis are putting pressure on a New York Times-approved bureaucrat like Gilday — the wrong man at the wrong time — to attempt to do the right thing.