Derrick Van Orden: Pentagon Prioritizes ‘White Rage,’ ‘Pronouns,’ Coronavirus Data over Military Suicides

Rep.-elect Derrick Van Orden (R-WI), a retired Navy SEAL, said on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily that the Pentagon prioritizes political nonsense for military servicepersons — including “white rage” and “pronouns” — over addressing suicides among veterans and active-duty military personnel.

Van Orden remarked, “The secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are worried about white rage, and they’re trying to figure out the pronouns that servicemen and women should be using.”

He said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley are not prioritizing veteran suicides as a crisis to be addressed. He stated, “The pronouns the Department of Defense [and] General Milley [and] General Austin needs to start thinking about — the pronouns should be ‘dead’ and ‘widow’ and ‘fatherless child.’  Those are the pronouns they need to be focusing on.”

While testifying before the House Armed Services Committee in June of 2021 regarding the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2022 budget request, Milley said, “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white.” He also defended the integration of racial “critical race theory” propaganda into military training and policy.

“Nobody … that I’m aware of at the Department of Defense has ever been held accountable for their troops committing suicide,” he added. “They’re listing how many of [our] troops were affected with COVID on these people’s reports, but [they’re] not listing the amount of troops that committed suicide on their watch. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Van Orden noted how suicide statistics among active duty military personnel are not commonly known among senior officers, reflecting a lack of prioritization of military suicide prevention coming from top leadership.

“I don’t think they are taking it seriously,” he determined. “When they say it’s Lloyd Austin’s priority to prevent this, I don’t believe that to be true. I spoke to so many active-duty officers and senior enlisted guys. I’m like, ‘How many people have killed themselves on your watch?’, and they’re like, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ That means it’s not priority.”

He went on, “When I was a paramedic in the SEAL teams, I could name doses and routes for medications. I could do blast formulas for making different charges. I could recite things about ballistics off the top of my head, because those are important to what I was doing specifically as a job function.”

“Any commanding officer of any unit of any size that cannot — off the top of his or her head — tell you exactly how many men and women have committed suicide on their watch should be fired immediately,” he said. “It’s time to take the kid gloves off of this stuff and take it very, very seriously.”

He added, “If you have troops on your command committing suicide, your career needs to be looked at. Your leadership style needs to be looked at.”

The member-elect from Wisconsin said he would prioritize policies seeking to collect and organize key data and statistics regarding suicides among active-duty and retired military servicepersons upon his assumption of office.

Van Orden implored veterans in need of help to contact the Veterans Crisis Line, which can be contacted via phone call, text, and online chat.

“I’m going to urge my brothers and sisters in uniform not to make a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” he concluded.

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.