Green and black

General Mark Milley, the chairman of America’s joint chiefs of staff, and thus the country’s top military officer, provoked a furore in June when he defended West Point’s teaching of critical race theory, a set of ideas about structural racism. “I want to understand white rage,” he told an audience of bewildered congressmen. “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding…the country which we are here to defend?”

Plenty, according to Republicans. Such ideas were “very dangerous to unit cohesion and morale”, argued Tom Cotton, a senator. Donald Trump, who picked General Milley for the job, seeing him as a kindred spirit, demanded that he resign, accusing him of appeasing a “woke mob”. Mr Trump’s eldest son posted a doctored photo of the general with pink hair and a rainbow medal.

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