Poor bastards at Lockheed

City Journal reports:

Last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege,” according to documents I have obtained.

The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, was led by the diversity-consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helping white males “awaken together.” The Lockheed employees, all senior leaders in the company, included Aaron Huckaby, director of global supply chain operations; retired Air Force lieutenant colonel David Starr, director of the Hercules C-130 military transport program; retired Air Force lieutenant general Bruce Litchfield, vice president of sustainment operations; and Glenn Woods, vice president of production for the Air Force’s $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program. (Lockheed Martin did not return request for comment.)

At the beginning of the program, the diversity trainers led a “free association” exercise, asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the term “white men.” The trainers wrote down “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.” According to the participants, these perceptions have led to “assumptions about white men and diversity,” with many employees believing that white men “don’t care about diversity,” “have a classical perspective on history and colonialism,” and “don’t want to give away our power.”

The White Men As Full Diversity Partners team—Jim Morris, Mark Havens, and Michael Welp—framed the purpose of the training session as providing a benefit for white men who embrace the diversity and inclusion philosophy. In response to a prompt about “what’s in it for white men,” the participants listed benefits such as: “I won’t get replaced by someone who is a better full diversity partner,” “[I will] improve the brand, image, reputation of white men,” and “I [will] have less nagging sense of guilt that I am the problem.”

In a set of related resources, White Men As Full Diversity Partners lays out its theory of privilege. The firm’s founders, Welp and Bill Proudman, have argued that white males must “work hard to understand” their “white privilege,” “male privilege,” and “heterosexual privilege,” which affords them unearned benefits. The firm’s training programs are designed to assist white men in discovering the “roots of white male culture.” That culture, according to Welp and Proudman, consists of traits—such as “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” “operating from principles,” and “striving towards success”—which are superficially positive but are “devastating” to women and minorities.

Those poor bastards. Surely this is against the Geneva conventions. Spending 30 minutes listening to a woke w***fest would be torture enough. But to force them to endure three days of that is inhumane. Were they given sick bags?