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Diversity is our strength
By Bill Roberts
Aug 3, 2026
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Alan Turing, perhaps, did as much to personally win World War II as anyone alive then.  He led the team of Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, England in developing an early electromechanical computer that, along with some very clever cryptography, was able to decipher the Nazi "Enigma" naval codes which were supposedly unbreakable.  This knowledge allowed the Allies to track German submarines, saving hundreds of supply ships and their crews, as well as the tens of thousands of Limeys and GI's and Soviets who received the timely supplies they carried.  As cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter wrote, "It is fair to say we owe much to Alan Turing for the fact that we are not under Nazi rule today."

He was exactly the kind of man who President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth would NOT want in the U.S. Military.  Alan Turing was gay. 

A world class marathoner, he sometimes ran the 40 miles from Bletchley to London for meetings during the war.  But Trump and Hegseth wouldn't want him.  Alan Turing was an atheist.
 
Turing was a pioneer in computing and what we now know as Artificial Intelligence (AI).  The 1950 Turing Test was an early means to judge a machine's "intelligence" based on performance.  If a person types messages, questions, or conversations simultaneously to a human and a computer and cannot reliably tell the difference between the responses, the machine can be said to have passed the test.  The reader can judge if we are at that point. 

During the postwar years Turing created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, and he participated in other foundational events in theoretical computing.  He wrote on mathematical biology including morphogenesis.  He predicted the existence of oscillating chemical reactions which were not observed until the 1960s.  I doubt if HHS Secretary Kennedy has learned about those yet--it's not something one's likely to discover from roadkill genitalia.  

Turing's first love as a young man died at 18 from bovine tuberculosis from drinking raw milk, a consequence which Secretary Kennedy would not have foreseen, either.

In 1952, Turing was prosecuted in Britain for homosexuality.  After undergoing chemical hormone "treatments" in lieu of prison, Turing's death in 1954 by cyanide poisoning was ruled a suicide.  He was 41.

In 2009 the British Prime Minister made an official apology for the ways by which the government had mistreated him.  The Queen issued a pardon in 2013, and as of 2021 Turing appears on the British 50-pound note.

World War II was won by gays and atheists like Alan Turing.  By minorities like the Tuskegee Airmen and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.  By women, like the Women's Army Corps and their navy counterparts, the WAVES.  They all earned the right to serve.  They proved themselves. 

For a (supposedly recovering) lush like Hegseth to trample through the highest ranks of our military, imposing his most assuredly racist, sexist, and hypocritically Christian values is beyond insulting to the many and varied patriots who have served and saved democracy.  The next person you devalue and discard, Secretary Hegseth, might well be this generation's Alan Turing.