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On the 81st anniversary of D-Day this Friday, tens of thousands of veterans are expected to spill onto the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and more than 200 other veteran-led protests are anticipated across the country.
The “D-Day Protest Tracker” lists them all.
“They've been arguing against what they see as an authoritarian turn by the executive,” Prof.
, a UMass Amherst scholar of legal studies and political science, noted in a Substack Live on Wednesday. “They're also very concerned about their benefits.”Her article in The Conversation — later reprinted on Military.com — noted that nearly a quarter of the federal workforce are veterans, even though they represent only 6 percent of the U.S. population.
“As the federal government has indiscriminately slashed jobs, veterans are especially hard hit because they are overrepresented in the federal workforce, and that's due to a law that was passed in 1944 that says that when the federal government is hiring, if two applicants are equal, a veteran should be hired over the other veteran: DEI for veterans,” she said, abbreviating diversity, equity and inclusion.
In addition, a leaked memo revealed that the Department of Veterans Affairs planned to slash 83,000 jobs, a large number considering that 90 percent of the agency’s jobs relate to healthcare.
“So, what the veterans are seeing is a real threat to their healthcare and their benefits and the workforce that's needed to administer those,” Rowen said. “It goes directly against the law that was passed by Congress in 2022 to expand veterans benefits to people who suffered from particular illnesses during the Global War on Terror.”
The Trump administration keeps adding insult to injury, whether through Donald Trump’s since-shelved suggestion to rename Veterans Day to “Victory Day for World War I,” Pete Hegseth’s carelessness with the national security in Signalgate, or firing Black, female or LGBTQ service members. On Pride Month, the Trump administration announced plans to drop the name of decorated Navy veteran and gay icon Harvey Milk from a ship.
“It's insulting. It's not necessary, even if you're trying to dismantle DEI, to do something that is so flagrantly against the LGBT community,” Rowen said.
She noted that it’s also out of step with an increasingly diverse U.S. military, in a way that could ultimately have significant political consequences for a reliably Republican voting bloc.
“It's important to understand that the military is going to be 40 percent people of color in the next two decades, and that maps on pretty well to the U.S. population,” Rowen said.
Watch the full, 30-minute video for more about the upcoming protests and the history of how veterans became such a potent force in U.S. politics. You can find listings of the upcoming D-Day demonstrations on “Rising This Week,” a regular calendar of court hearings, protests, and other forms of civic engagement that runs every Sunday on All Rise News.
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