USAF ACADEMY, Colorado (LifeSiteNews) — The United States Air Force Academy recently hosted a “transgender” Space Force engineer to deliver a lecture on the importance of identity-politics “inclusion” in America’s fighting forces, underscoring the Biden Pentagon’s continued fixation on woke ideology in every aspect of government.
As highlighted by the Daily Wire, on February 6, the Air Force uploaded to YouTube a lecture by Colonel “Bree” Fram, an astronautical engineer with the U.S. Space Force, who is also an author, podcaster, and public speaker on LGBT “identity” in the military and former president of the pro-transgender military nonprofit SPARTA.
Fram, a biological male who “identifies” as a woman, “came out publicly on the day the transgender ban in the military was dropped in 2016,” according to the Air Force, “served through the re-imposition of a ban from 2019-2021,” and “is currently one of the highest ranking out-transgender[-identifying] officers in the United States military.”
“Inclusion takes action, inclusion requires asking, inclusion requires understanding, and it is more work, it is a lot more work for a leader but I need you to be willing to do it,” Fram said to the crowd. “In the future, we are going to fight and win war with brain power, and if those brains happen to be in a trans body [sic]… you should want them serving alongside you.”
Fram’s slideshow presentation suggested that servicemen and women should “be allies by standing with and supporting marginalized communities… and advocates by speaking out and raising awareness on issues,” suggesting that left-wing activism on domestic political controversies should be a component of military service.
“While I don’t have a crystal ball, I can look out and say, ‘well, either next year things will be great or I will be fighting for my ability to continue serving,’” he added, alluding to the 2024 election.
“Her [sic] talk reinforced the value of diversity within our military and the importance of removing unnecessary barriers to service,” an Air Force spokesman later told the Wire.
“Consistent with DoD and DAF policy, yes, the U.S. Air Force Academy recognizes that an individual’s internal or personal sense of gender may not match the individual’s sex assigned at birth,” the spokesman added, and “intentional misgendering of an individual may be considered harassment or discrimination under our Equal Opportunity policies.”
Fram gave his presentation in his Space Force uniform. The military generally prohibits servicemembers from appearing to endorse partisan candidates or causes while in uniform, but blurring such lines has been a defining element of the Biden administration.
The steady rise of “woke” ideology within the military, which has persisted and grown since the Clinton years despite the presidencies of Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump, has been intensified by Biden, who upon taking office quickly moved to open the military to recruits suffering from gender dysphoria in a reversal of Trump administration policy, then had his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin launch a review of supposed “domestic extremism” within the military that many saw as a pretext to purge conservative views from the ranks.
In March 2023, the Center for Military Readiness (CMR) published an update on the administration’s work to infuse the armed forces with left-wing gender ideology, ranging from enforcement of preferred pronouns, to allowing cross-dressing and the use of opposite-sex showers and restrooms on military bases, to making it harder to access information on the negative consequences of such policies. Last November, the Pentagon requested an additional $114.7 million for diversity programs in the upcoming fiscal year, representing a total of $269.2 million in taxpayer dollars just on military diversity since Biden took office.
Until December 2022, Biden’s Pentagon leaders also enforced COVID-19 shot mandates on American servicemen and women, provoking lawsuits and threatening soldier and pilot shortages in the tens of thousands, which only added to broader problems of force strength, troop morale, and public confidence.
Such priorities have taken their toll. During a Pentagon press briefing in April 2022 on the Army’s budget for Fiscal Year 2023, Under Secretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo announced the Army had “proactively made a decision to temporarily reduce our end strength from 485,000 Soldiers to 476,000 in FY ’22, and 473,000 in FY ’23.” The Military Times reported at the time that this “could leave the service at its smallest size since 1940, when it had just over 269,000 troops.”
Gallup and Ronald Reagan Institute polls have both shown that the public has lost confidence in the military’s leaders, which presumably also has a significant effect on prospective soldiers’ willingness to sign up.