Anti-White Racism Endures at Lockheed Martin

tomklingenstein.com
Editor's Note

When a society is divided not just over the particular demands of justice but over its very nature, it has entered a state of cold civil war. In America today, that division is between the classical and founding idea of justice as giving to each his due, and the woke idea of justice centered on group quotas: equal outcomes for all identity groups, by any means necessary.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is a major victory for believers in the classical idea of justice. But, as Jeremy Carl illustrates, the false justice of the destructive Left still reigns in many of our society’s most important power centers.

I have often remarked that one of the difficulties in writing The Unprotected Class, my recent book on the rise of anti-white racism, was choosing what incidents to highlight. Indeed, while the book weighed in at 400 pages (counting notes and references) as I wrote at the time, if I had been trying to be comprehensive it could have been 10 times longer.  In particular, while I devoted a chapter to big business’s discrimination against white Americans, the material included was really only the tip of the iceberg. 

That reality was illustrated dramatically in the recent case of Lockheed Martin, America’s largest defense contractor, which was “caught” red-handed having engaged in blatant anti-white discrimination over a number of years.  But I use the word “caught” advisedly, as their racist and discriminatory policies were, for the most part, hiding in plain sight.  While a few folks like myself and the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo raised a fuss over them and suggested that they blatantly violated civil rights laws, until Donald Trump was elected president, the behavior in the Lockheed scandals was considered normal in far too many corporate boardrooms. 

As documented by Rufo and colleague Ryan Thorpe and corroborated by whistleblower accounts, as recently as a few years ago, Lockheed Martin blatantly violated existing civil rights laws to discriminate against white people. The Lockheed case Rufo documented was as open-and-shut as it was remarkable. In 2022, after submitting a carefully calculated list of bonus recipients among their staff — known as the “Comp Adder” list — based on merit, an employee who would become the whistleblower was informed by higher-ups that the list had a problem: it included “too many white employees.”

Santiago Bulnes, a Lockheed vice president now leading engineering on the firm’s F-35 program (a program 10 years late and almost 100% over budget), emailed the whistleblower, noting that human resources director La Wanda Moorer was concerned about the “diversity stats” of the bonus list. Moorer’s instructions were clear: increase the number of people of color on the list, even if it meant removing an equal number of “non-minority” (i.e., white) employees. The directive was explicit, as was the demand to disadvantage whites: “Increasing POC for Comp Adder will result in removing equal count of non-minority.”  

This is, of course, wildly illegal. It is also commonplace in the corporate world, albeit in various guises. For example, in The Unprotected Class I wrote about numerous similar cases, such as senior Google recruiter Arne Wilberg who claimed that he was fired for refusing to discriminate against White and Asian men in his hiring practices.  According to Wilberg, “recruiters were given quotas” and “told to cancel interviews with white and Asian male job candidates.”

When the whistleblower questioned what would happen if insufficient minority candidates could be found to replace white employees, Moorer’s response was chilling. “The preference is for you to get there,” she wrote, implying that failure to comply would shift the conversation to what “risk” the business was willing to assume — hinting at potential legal repercussions of not punishing whites to advantage minorities, most likely under the discredited (but still law of the land) “disparate impact” theory. This theory holds that, if job candidates are hired or promoted in a racially disproportionate way, even if no active intent to discriminate is alleged, the process can be said to have a so-called “disparate impact” on the underrepresented group.  

This policy (which I have written about previously) was first invented out of whole cloth, and against explicit promises made during the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in the Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power (1971). While Griggs was largely gutted by the court in 1989 in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (even the liberal court of the 1980s recognized they had gone too far), it was then inexplicably enshrined into law by the George H.W. Bush administration in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

Indeed, Lockheed Martin’s human resources counselor, in response to a complaint from the whistleblower. said that while there were obvious risks to overtly discriminating against whites, it was still “the lesser of two evils.” Moorer added, “We haven’t ever been in a situation where we haven’t gotten there,” suggesting that anti-white discrimination  was not a one-off but a recurring policy.

Ultimately, the whistleblower complied, swapping 18 white employees for 18 minority employees on the “comp adder” list, solely on the basis of race. A few months later, the whistleblower resigned, leaving behind a resignation letter that laid bare the moral and legal implications of Lockheed’s actions: “I, at the direction of Lockheed, have actively discriminated against higher performing individuals, denied them higher pay they earned, denied them the opportunity to be motivated as a top performer. Not only does this force a violation of my conscience that forces me to leave, but we could have 18 valid individual claims with associated public embarrassment and lost customer trust.”  

Again, what is unusual here is not the action itself, but that someone stepped forward to challenge it.  One other thing to keep in mind: Even when assembling the original list, it is highly unlikely that the people compiling it were blind to diversity issues. You do not get to a certain level at a big corporation like Lockheed without knowing how to “play the game.” So, almost assuredly, there was at least some effort to improve diversity even in the initial list by adding lower-performing minorities and including fewer whites.  But even that thumb on the scale wasn’t enough for the diversity commissars.

Incredibly, this is not the first time that Rufo exposed Lockheed’s racially discriminatory practices. As he documented in 2021, the company held “re-education camps” for white male executives. In a three-day program hosted by the Orwellian-sounding consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, 13 senior leaders — including a former three-star general and the vice president of production for the F-35 program — were subjected to exercises designed to deconstruct their “white male privilege.”  

The training began with a “free association” exercise, where participants were asked to list connotations for “white men.” The resulting terms offered were a litany of stereotypes: “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.” The program then moved to a series of “privilege statements,” forcing participants to acknowledge supposed advantages like “I can commit acts of terrorism, violence or crime and not have it attributed to my race” or “My earning potential is 15-33% higher than a woman’s.” (a “fact” that has been endlessly debunked). They were also commanded to discuss their heterosexual privilege and male privilege.

When asked what the benefit of this training was, one executive replied, perhaps sincerely, and perhaps with carefully calibrated irony, that “I won’t get replaced by someone who is a better full diversity partner.” 

These trainings, conducted at a company that receives billions in taxpayer dollars, sparked outrage when Rufo first reported them in 2021. They prompted calls for congressional inquiries, with critics arguing that such blatantly discriminatory treatment endangered national security. Yet, despite a temporary ban on such trainings under President Trump’s executive order, President Biden immediately rescinded this order in 2021 and allowed Lockheed to continue its DEI initiatives unabated. 

The cultural implications of this anti-white discrimination are profound. Lockheed Martin, a company steeped in the traditionally male-dominated, conservative world of aerospace and defense, would seem an unlikely candidate on the surface for progressive ideologies, Yet, as Rufo noted, “Many believe that masculine industries, such as military and defense, are naturally immune to left-wing race and gender ideologies. This is mostly a myth. These institutions are organized according to prestige and profit—and when those signals point to ‘woke,’ industry leaders have dutifully followed.” Government contractors such as Lockheed, who depend on political favor for their livelihood, are in fact, acutely aware of cultural trends, and if the government demands anti-white policies, they will be quick to comply. 

Caught red-handed, Lockheed’s response has been tepid. In a statement in reaction to the new expose, the company claimed to be a “meritocracy” and promised to investigate the claims, compensating any affected employees if wrongdoing was found. Critics, including the highly capable and aggressive assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, have taken notice. Strong action from the DOJ’s civil rights division against Lockheed would send a valuable signal.

But Lockheed’s capitulation to race-based discrimination has enormous implications for America more broadly. A company tasked with building the world’s most advanced military technology to keep America safe has undermined its own talent pool by prioritizing race over performance.  If anti-white policies can be maintained here, they will flourish everywhere. It’s vital that the Trump administration take a strong and visible stand in this case to show companies everywhere that anti-white discrimination will no longer be tolerated in the corporate world.