Diversity Thursday

DNI News Bad - Harvard News Good

Things are moving so fast and in the right direction over the last week to the degree we could do a DivThu every 6-hrs…but no one wants that.

Just one day a week is quite enough.

Below I will link to some things that at a normal time would be standalone DivThu posts, but this week I am going to stick to two things; the warping in the Intelligence Community (IC) by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) commissars and the outstanding opportunity to open people’s eyes from the events at Harvard.

For those with a military background - still remember all the absurdity, lost productivity, and career box checking of Joint Duty and Joint Professional Military Education requirements that oozed out of the Goldwater-Nichols Era?

Believe it or not, DEI has managed to even co-opt Joint Duty Credit. Yes, the cultural Marxist construct that midwifed the closeted Jew-haters to come out in the open the last few months. That world view.

Our IC, to be charitable, has a spotty record the last quarter century. It’s performance record is not helped by its leadership’s almost-decade or longer fetish of being more interested in domestic politics than they should. Another sign of this lack of focus and intellectual clarity can be found in its interesting idea of what is included in “Joint.”

They believe that you should get Joint Duty Credit not for investing your time in expanding your expertise in the intelligence profession - no, not at all. What you need to do is take a leadership position in one of the bevy of sectarian “Affinity Groups” that form the organizing and foot soldiers for the DEI commissariat. Become a Zampolit, get Joint Duty Credit.

This came my way from a member of the Salamander underground. It seemed almost unbelievable and until I double checked the sender tilted my head a bit at it … but sadly … well …

BEHOLD!

(NB: I redacted the names to protect the pawns).

Good news is that this may be a secondary indication that the these sectarian organizations are having such a hard time getting people to volunteer to join or do their grunt work. The embedded DEI nomenklatura had to find a way to get DNI to “encourage” participation. Even in this, there is some good between the lines. Passive resistance is resistance. Keep it up IC folks. We know most of you are just trying to do your job.

Let’s be clear, this is not just something that popped up during the Biden Administration. Some parts of DEI grew its greatest roots in the Bush (both) and Trump Administrations.

Not to pick on the IC alone, this is a government natsec problem. The issue with “affinity groups” has been covered at the OG Blog all the way back to 2007, and here since we moved to Substack.

I just realized some of you might not know what an “affinity group is.” You can get the idea pretty fast by looking around the federal government. For the IC, this is as close as I can figure out.

The Unity Council represents various racial, ethnic, professional, and sexual orientation minority groups within the element, and liaises with ODNI’s IC Affinity Network—where senior leaders across the IC chair 10 networks in positions that are collateral duty assignments.

I’ll tell you something, where at one point most organizations were more than proud to list their “affinity groups,” and you could easily find each organization’s approved list on their DEI websites. I’ll take it as a good sign it is getting harder and harder to find them actually named.

Heck, if you go to the Navy’s corner of the Diversity Industry, you only get this pablum. However, if you do a google search for “us navy affinity groups“ to get what they recently scrubbed;

Affinity groups are barely mentioned in the IC’s Equal employment Opportunity and Diversity EnterprIse Strategy (2015-2020), but it’s there.

Some of the IC’s distraction in this area is comical. Everyone here knows about the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand “Five Eyes” intel arrangement? Well the National Security Agency (NSA) seems to have the bandwidth - pun intended - to have a NSA “Five-Eyes Pride.”

I can’t make this stuff. I’m not that imaginative. I’m still waiting for the “Five-Eyes Fans of the Colombian Women’s Beach Volleyball” support organization, but maybe that is just too culturally forward. Maybe.

You know who isn’t hiding their affinity groups? Well, always go to the universities, or in this case the US Naval Academy. Their DEI Staff has a nice long list. Seems to be a few missing though … huh.

Our sisters in the US Coast Guard will still name names for us.

At least the USN and USCG are not giving people Joint Credit for being a Commissar for those fountains of sectarianism and division…yet.

OK, that’s part one for you to ponder today. Now for Part-II: Electric Boogaloo, the events at Harvard.

Hopefully everyone is watching the bonfire of the inanities over at Harvard. If so, you know the critical player is Bill Ackman, the CEO Pershing Square Capital Management.

Tuesday on X he published a letter that is simply sublime. Read it all at the link, but I want to get a couple of pull quotes for those who have been with us for almost two decades we’ve been doing DivThu.

Remember all the slander, names, bad-faith, and foam-flecked threats we’ve received over the years? Well, more and more people are joining those of us who believe that people are individuals and not members of competing amorphous sectarian mobs defined by immutable characteristics. Every person deserved to be treated fairly. A multi-ethnic nation can only prosper and stay united if we make every effort to bring everyone closer together, not drive them apart.

No one said the pushback to a better place would be simple, easy, or comfortable - but though there is a step back now and then - mostly we are taking three steps forward in the correct direction to that better place of equality.

…the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state toedded an anti-racist one.

…

The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.

The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared.

Before you read the below, I want you to think about how deep DEI is embedded in DOD, DOS, DNI, and all the other national security entities in our government - and even more pernicious, at our service academies;

When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.

The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.

There is this simple truth;

Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.

An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.

He also understands the deeper evil of this Cultural Marxist construct;

The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.

There is a good first step that can be made in any organization to begin the process of decoupling from this self-destructive world view. DEI/DEIB/DEIAB and you can put an “O” for “Office of” and that tells you the step;

The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated.

By their actions, they show they do not bring people together, but drive them apart - so from Harvard to Annapolis and beyond; that’s your first step.