VMI’s “Struggle Session”

Nearly five years ago I entitled the first of several commentaries on my alma mater, “VMI Test Case for the Country.” The school was handed the gloriously soft-ballish opportunity to reject the neomarxist revolution ramped-up by George Floyd’s death. Based upon lies, deceptions, and historical ignorance, the movement reared its ugly head more brazenly than ever before in our country. Given VMI’s unique setting, heritage, and reputation, the school might have helped stem the tide of DEI’s de-civilizing influence.

VMI failed the test.

The last five years have not been good ones for VMI. Those who graduated from VMI possessing traditional values and character did so despite the school’s leadership, not because of it. Moreover, the country now teeters on the edge of rampant incivility promoted by some on the Left. Grounded upon an atheistic ideology exacerbated by the abandonment of physical, biological, and historical realities, should such behaviors—including politically inspired violence—somehow attain widespread acceptance, our days are numbered.

Recapping this struggle-session, it was early 2019 when the governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia came within a gnat’s eyelash of being forced from office. A decades-old blackface incident came to light, and he could not get his story straight. Had the governor simply confessed his wrongdoing and offered assurances that he had matured over the years, all might have been forgiven. Amidst the crisis, Richmond’s radical leftist caucus saw their opportunity. They propped up the wounded governor in exchange for his establishing a DEI cabinet-level position. Virginia thus became the first State in the nation with a cabinet official dedicated to so-called Diversity—the significance of which is now generally understood to be an unconstitutional, institutionalized anti-white racism conducted under a fraudulent oppressor-versus-oppressed dialectic.

This dialectic is a fraud, especially in America. Will today’s DEI ideologues please tell us exactly what was the white privilege enjoyed by south Georgia tobacco farmers in the 1930s—whites, whose children never knew what an individual Christmas gift was—and who lived and worked in harmony with their equally poor black neighboring farmers? In one typical white family, it was the practice each year by November for the mother to take the children’s communal teddy bear and to repair and replace any defects with the treasured toy’s eyes, stuffing, and so on, presenting the new-and-improved version to the children at Christmastime. This is only one of many historical cases the neomarxists cannot deal with.

Another was highlighted by the address in 2021 of a descendant of slaves, Derrick Wilburn, who boldly declared before his children’s school board in Colorado Springs: “I’m not oppressed, and I’m not a victim. . . . Racism in America would, by and large, be dead today if it were not for certain people and institutions keeping it on life support.”

Back to Richmond, 2019. In contrast to normal bureaucracy, the lightning-speed establishment and filling of the new cabinet post—within eight months—suggested the existence of a quid pro quo. But the governor and his Richmond masters went further, seeing the chance to transform VMI, a State institution whose nominal commander-in-chief was the governor himself.

In October 2020—amidst nationwide COVID turmoil and the Floyd-inspired summer of “mostly peaceful” protests—the governor issued a broadside against his alma mater. He charged VMI with an “appalling culture of ongoing structural racism.”

It was a lie: in VMI’s jargon, a “false official statement.” Examining the countless irresponsible media reports on the matter revealed the governor’s statement was based largely on a single documented incident – yes, one – in which a white second-year cadet spoke an inappropriate word to a black first-year cadet (VMI “Rat”) during a workout session at the outset of the school year. The word was “lynch.”[1] It was wrong. Later, the Rat acknowledged he had been sandbagging during the workout. The second-year cadet was suspended from VMI. He never returned. But before he departed, he apologized to the Rat in front of witnesses, extending his hand to shake the Rat’s hand. He refused. Later, the Rat left VMI as well. Both young men had been under stress. Both were in the wrong. But one sought to make things right in the end. This was the primary incident that became the governor’s pretext for what befell VMI.

It was most unfortunate that the governor—with whom this writer served on the VMI Honor Court in 1979-80—included on his official stationery: “Former President of VMI Honor Court.”

That was the most appalling part.

In December 2020, the statue of Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was removed from VMI’s grounds in front of the barracks, the most ominous signal that the revolutionaries had gained the ramparts. Inexplicably, VMI’s leadership chose this course. As Solzhenitsyn warned in 1978, the West had “lost its civic courage.” Within its own niche, VMI began living and speaking by the lies of systemic, structural, institutional racism—deceptive terms intended to hide the utopian fantasy that having the Morally Pure Ones in charge should end every human flaw relationally or otherwise (read “zero tolerance”). As the prodigious Thomas Sowell wrote in The Vision of the Anointed: “. . . the vocabulary of the anointed requires no clear definitions, logical arguments, or empirical verifications. Its role is precisely to be a substitute for all these things.”

Orwellian nuttiness followed. A “woke” VMI began referring to the principled warrior whose campaigns and leadership were studied for a century at military schools in the United States and overseas, in increasingly distant terms. Never mind that in the 1850s Jackson, of high Christian conscience, taught the slaves in his neighborhood to read the Bible—which was against Virginia law at the time.

In a recent piece on “Wokeness at the Smithsonian,” Jeffrey H. Anderson concludes: “On the cusp of the nation’s [250th anniversary], our museums should remind Americans of the greatness of our nation’s heroes, who, while imperfect, stand among the great men of history.” Without question, Stonewall Jackson stands among them.

Moreover, what our utopian friends fail to realize is that perfect human behavior will never exist in a sin-ravaged world—regardless of institutional safeguards, and led by the Pure Ones.

From 2021 to 2025, numerous incidents illustrated the school’s sad decline; here are a few:

• Bringing in a speaker who addressed sexual perversions favorably. VMI called it leadership and ethics training.
• Toying with Maoist struggle-session self-examination exercises that promoted self-loathing by white cadets. VMI called it Diversity training.
• Meddling with and attempting to control the independent student-run newspaper. VMI called it protecting free speech.
• Thumbing its nose at Governor Youngkin, who in 2022 signed Executive Order 1, thereby ending “inherently divisive concepts” in Virginia public schools. VMI dismissed it as the result of a single election.
• Claiming politics not based on performance when the new superintendent’s contract renewal offer was for only one year—an astonishing case of whining and unprofessionalism that no cadet could have displayed without censure—the DEI-promoting “Supe” showed his true character.

(Instead of firing him immediately, the board of visitors allowed him to finish out the school year—a pathetic leadership model for the cadets. In contrast, his predecessor, General Peay, never complained to the press and maintained the utmost professionalism, despite his firing—which was 100% political.)

Foremost British historian Niall Ferguson asks whether the West still believes there is anything of value in its civilization. He suggests that perhaps the greatest threat is not the intentions of communist China or the strength of resurgent, jihadist Islam. Rather, it may be the question of whether or not most Westerners think their culture, language, traditions, and history matter. Are they worth preserving, defending? There are signs this may be happening in the US, UK, and parts of continental Europe. It’s now or never.

Had VMI defended its culture, traditions, and history in 2020-21, who can say whether the example of a military school enjoying a long history of high, merit-based respect—not only within the Commonwealth but throughout the country and beyond—might have helped other institutions to find their own backbones against the neomarxists.

From the Proverbs writer: “There are three things that will not be satisfied, Four that will not say, ‘Enough’ . . . And [the last is] fire that never says, ‘Enough.’”

The fires of divisive propaganda—that spew from the radical Left—have always been intended for the enrichment and empowerment of those who are “pure in [their] own eyes,” yet are “not washed from [their] filthiness.” Either their leaders comprise the few true believers or the shrewd manipulators of the well-meaning witless and historically ignorant.

The Left never says, “Enough.”

The VMI community, Virginians—indeed, Americans who care about the survival of their institutions—must reject completely the pernicious and poisonous concept of structural (systemic, institutional) racism under a neo-Marxist based definition. Otherwise, do not be surprised one day to find that not only has Stonewall’s statue been taken away; other institutions will necessarily follow, among them families,[2] schools, businesses, and churches. If one of the most staunchly meritocratic, honor-bound, and—for decades—color-blind institutions in the country, the Virginia Military Institute, [could] be made to implement fundamental changes demanded by advocates of a neo-Marxist based ideology, all institutions are at risk.

In 2025, perhaps enough of the VMI community as well as enough Americans who love their country and their Judeo-Christian civilization have had “Enough” of barbaric humanistic-materialism.

On the battlefield of ideas, the disaster that is DEI needs to DIE—with meritocracy restored.

Perhaps a letter to the new VMI superintendent from my good friend and, more important, a faithful “Former President of VMI Honor Court”—Carmen Villani ‘76—may help. If the Diversity office goes away, that will be a clue.

Time will tell.

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[1] When the Superintendent’s chief of staff called me about my “Lynching Threat” commentary, he did not dispute my rendering of the incident but desired for the subject to be dropped (Jan. 27, 2022).

[2] Concern for the institution of the nuclear family is legitimate; near the peak of BLM’s influence, on Nov. 9, 2020, the official BLM website touted, “. . . we disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” a traditional Marxist objective.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Forrest L. Marion

Forrest L. Marion graduated from the Virginia Military Institute with a BS degree in civil engineering. He earned an MA in military history from the University of Alabama and a doctorate in American history from the University of Tennessee. Since 1998, Dr. Marion has served as a staff historian and oral historian at the Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. Commissioned in 1980, he retired from the U.S. Air Force Reserve in 2010.

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