Who Was Cesar Chavez—and Who Will He Become?

The canonized legacy of Cesar Chavez is collapsing under revelations that recast a sainted activist as a deeply flawed—and possibly predatory—man the Left can no longer easily defend.

Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, eventually became the symbolic leader of the entire Mexican American community of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, he was eventually enshrined in the pantheon of modern leftist activists and civil rights leaders alongside Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., and Betty Friedan. His Chavez Foundation today emphasizes Chavez’s saintlike status as “a genuinely religious and spiritual figure.” His Tehachapi redoubt remains a national monument.

In public, Chavez stressed nonstop his common-man roots, his strong Catholicism, and his devotion to wife and family, and thereby turned the struggle to provide a livable wage and humane working conditions for farm workers into a broader civil rights movement—led by the Christlike martyr Cesar Chavez himself. He carefully constructed an image of the long-suffering moralist, at odds with greedy capitalist “growers,” whom Chavez often publicly said he loathed.

Chavez frequently quoted Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and went on well-publicized fasts and nonviolent marches. The Camelot Kennedys made yearly hajjes to California to meet with the holy man. 1960s college students ensured that table grapes were banned in campus cafeterias.

In 1971, as a bumbling freshman farm kid entering UC Santa Cruz, I can remember being confronted my first day on campus by screaming students outside my dorm door for bringing to my new room a tiny box of grapes I picked on our small 120-acre farm.

Trying to explain to furious (mostly) wealthy white kids from Los Angeles that family raisin farming had little to do with the labor fireworks over table-grape production in Delano was a waste of time.

Ping! Out to the Victor Davis Hanson list

No matter—following his premature death at 66 in 1993, Chavez was canonized, as his postmortem reputation reached angelic status. There is hardly a major California city today that does not have a street named after him. His name is emblazoned on state and federal buildings. His birthday, March 31, at least for now, is still a California holiday. There is a USNS Cesar Chavez cargo ship. Chavez statues dot California campuses. Until recently, few have ever questioned the canonization of Chavez.

Another leftist g_d tumbles down under the weight of truth. How irreverent of us to ask questions!

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"...I wonder what made the Navy think they needed to name a ship after a fruitpicker..."

I am sure that it was the exact same set of dynamics that made them think they needed to name a 22,000 ton Fleet Oiler "USNS Harvey Milk" after the first openly gay politician in California to be elected to office. That was Ray Mabus under Obama who did that.

The "Dynamic" was Ray Mabus.

Ray Mabus in 2010 also approved the naming of the USNS Caeser Chavez.
Ray Mabus is "The Dynamic" with Barack Obama pushing him along.
Mabus stated that he placed emphasis on "developing a more diverse force" during his tenure.Some personnel accused him of promoting "social engineering" policies.
Mabus removed zone distinctions from promotion considerations, allowing personnel to be considered equally for rank promotions without regard towards their specializations.
Mabus arranged for women to enter the submarine fleet in 2011.
Mabus pushed for the introduction of unisex uniforms in the Navy and the United States Marine Corps.
Mabus expanded the maternity leave of Navy Department personnel to 18 weeks, though Carter later trimmed this to 12 weeks across all armed forced in January 2016.
In late 2015 the Marine Corps released the results of a nine-month-long study on female performance in the corps, concluding that the average woman recruit was injured twice as often men, less accurate with infantry weapons, and not as effective at recovering wounded troops from the battlefield. Mabus immediately dismissed the findings, saying the Marine Corps failed to describe the effectiveness of the highest-performing women and did not provide sufficient reason to continue to exclude women from the most demanding roles in the corps. Following an instruction from Defense Secretary Carter, on January 1, 2016, Mabus ordered the Marine Corps to draft a plan to make all of its training co-ed within 15 days[87] and directed the service to make all job-titles gender neutral.

This last item was of great interest to me.

I have long posted excerpts from an article written by Jude Eden, a female Marine who served in Iraq (which, as a Marine with experience in a contested Iraq, though not front combat, carries greater weight than nearly any perspective from any angle that looks at this issue) which took information not only from this USMC study mentioned above, but from other military studies on female suitability for combat. This article from Jude Eden came out in 2015, which no doubt prompted her to write her linked article for which feminists widely and loudly criticized her for:

LINK: "Women in Combat: A Question of Standards" by Jude Law.

It is always refreshing to see a successful and accomplished woman with experience who looks at these issues of sex related capability rationally, which Jude Eden does without blinking or looking away.

The linked article is very informative...it has detail about the things the military did to lower the standards, and the degree of failure and lower extremity injury women suffer due to their less robust bone structure. From the article linked above:

In his 1998 book Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, Army veteran Brian Mitchell cites results for physical testing at West Point and Annapolis:
- When 61 percent [of female West Point plebes] failed a complete physical test, compared to 4.8 percent of male plebes, separate standards where devised for the women.
- Similar adjustments were made to other standards. At Annapolis, a two-foot stepping stool was added to an indoor obstacle course to enable women to surmount an eight-foot wall.
- Mitchell also reports that when women were integrated into the Air Force’s Cadet Wing, The [Air Force] academy’s physical fitness test included push-ups, pull-ups, a standing broad jump, and six-hundred-yard run, but since very few of the women could perform one pull-up or complete any of the other events, different standards were devised for them. They were allowed more time for the run, less distance on the jump, and fewer push-ups. Instead of pull-ups, female cadets were given points for the length of time they could hang on the bar ...They fell out of group runs, lagged behind on road marches, failed to negotiate obstacles on the assault courses (later modified to make them easier), could not climb a rope
- The women averaged eight visits to the medical clinic; the men averaged only 2.5 visits.
  
  On the average, women suffered nine times as many shin splints as men, five times as many stress fractures, and more than five times as many cases of tendinitis.
- By this time, the Army was further along with integrating women but was faced with a problem. There were no standards based on MOS requirements, so recruits were assigned to jobs based only on passing the physical fitness test in basic training. The Army had the right number of females allotted to recently opened heavy-lifting jobs. However, the women could not do the heavy lifting, they suffered higher rates of injury, and their attrition rates were higher. Therefore, the Army developed an objective standard to test recruits and “match the physical capacity of its soldiers with military occupational specialty requirements.” Introduced in 1981, the Military Entrance Physical Strength Capacity Test (MEPSCAT) tested lifting capabilities based on MOS demands as light, medium, moderately heavy, heavy (over 50 lbs.), and very heavy (100 lbs.)
  - “In the heavy lifting category, 82 percent of men and 8 percent of women qualified.”
- This is catastrophic in terms of mission readiness. According to a 1985 Army report entitled Evaluation of the Military Entrance Physical Strength Capacity Test, “if MEPSCAT had been a mandatory selection requirement during 1984, the Army would have created a substantial shortfall in the moderately heavy category (required lift is 80 pounds) by rejecting 32 percent of the female accessions.”
The Center for Military Readiness (CMR), an independent public policy organization, published a report in October 2014 confirming this conclusion. The report cited testing by the U.S. Marine Corps Training and Education Command (TECOM) in 2013.8 The command tested 409 male and 379 female Marine volunteers in several combat-related tasks.
- The test data highlighted in the CMR’s report include results of the clean-and-press, the 155 mm artillery lift-and-carry, and the obstacle course wall-with-assist-box.
- According to the CMR, “the clean-and-press event involves single lifts of progressively heavier weights from the ground to above the head (70, 80, 95, [and] 115 lbs.), plus 6 rep[etition]s with a 65 lb. weight. In this event, 80 percent of the men passed the 115 lb. test, but only 8.7 percent of the women passed.”
- In the 155 mm artillery lift-and-carry, a test simulating ordnance stowing, volunteers had to pick up a 95 lb. artillery round and carry it 50 meters in under 2 minutes.
- Noted the [Marine Corps] report, “Less than 1 percent of men, compared to 28.2 percent of wom- en, could not complete the 155 mm artillery round lift-and-carry in the allotted time.” If trainees had to “shoulder the round and/or carry multiple rounds, the 28.2 percent failure rate would increase.”
- Moreover, the CMR states, "On the obstacle course wall-with-assist-box test, a 20” high box (used to simulate a helping hand) essentially reduced the height of the 7 ft. wall to approximately 5’4.” Quoting the [Marine Corps] report, “Less than 1.2 percent of the men could not get over the obstacle course wall using an assist box, while wearing [protective equipment] ... [compared to] 21.32 percent of women who could not get over the obstacle course wall.”

This is damning stuff. Sure, some of the data is more than 20 or even 30 years old, but I suspect there are a huge number of people who would say "Oh, things have changed since then..."

I doubt it. If anything, it is worse.

Or at least it was worse until help showed up in the form of President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

If we can't turn this around and get permanent changes enacted, God help those soldiers in future combat, both male and female. They are both going to suffer higher casualties, and any women who believed the GI Jane pap that men and women are interchangeable are going to find out the truth.

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