Military leaders at the highest levels of the California National Guard pledged loyalty to the LGBT community during an official ceremony led by the general whom Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) later appointed to lead the force in 2022. One attendee told the Washington Free Beacon that members felt pressured to appear at the ceremony, which felt “culty.”
The California National Guard is tasked with safeguarding the state from natural disasters such as the fire that scorched Los Angeles in January, but at least four of its generals took a break from those duties to profess their allyship with the LGBT community during a June 27, 2016, event at the guard’s Sacramento headquarters, photos unearthed by the Free Beacon show. Pictures of the ceremony show the generals signing a wide-ranging “Ally Affirmation” statement pledging to challenge anyone who utters an “anti-LGBT joke or remark” in their presence.
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A retired guardsman who attended the ceremony described it as “very awkward and culty” and said he and other audience members felt pressured to attend out of fear of retaliation.
“The room was full because everybody knew who it was important to,” the retired guardsman told the Free Beacon. “If I didn’t outwardly support this, I was kind of a dead man.”
A former senior leader of the California National Guard told the Free Beacon the ceremony was the brainchild of Major General Matthew Beevers, who at the time served as deputy head of the guard and was pictured onstage during the event. The former leader said Beevers oversaw the guard’s Sacramento headquarters in 2016, worked closely with Newsom, and “knew his proclivity towards this kind of thing.” Newsom, who was the lieutenant governor of California at the time of the ceremony, had already declared his candidacy in the 2018 gubernatorial election, which he ultimately won in a 22-point victory.
“It was very opportunistic, and all of that was designed to curry favor with the person of the governor himself and the governor’s staff, so that Matthew Beevers could eventually become the adjutant general,” the former military leader said. “He believed you don’t have to be good at emergency response or fighting and winning our nation’s wars. You just have to be super woke.”
Newsom appointed Beevers to lead the California National Guard in August 2022. Beevers, who has faced allegations of referring to his Jewish subordinates as “kike lawyers,” secured the promotion after several years of performative virtue-signaling in his capacity as a senior military commander.
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Beevers is now under fire for dismantling a highly trained volunteer firefighting force known as Team Blaze about a year before the Los Angeles fires. That move rendered the California National Guard incapable of sending a complete firefighting force to the city until 10 days after the fires broke out, the Free Beacon reported. While Newsom’s press office on January 24 disparaged Team Blaze firefighters as “inadequately trained,” military records obtained by the Free Beacon show that the Newsom administration rewarded the team in 2021 for its “outstanding performance” and exemplary “wildland firefighting training.”
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President Donald Trump in January signed an executive order abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the military, and Hegseth pledged to remove any “woke” service members.
The California National Guard did not return a request for comment.
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