Margaret Thatcher Explains Kamala Harris

posted by Katie Pavlich at Townhall 

Margaret Thatcher once said, “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

When Hurricane Helene slammed into a number of southern states, wiping out entire towns in North Carolina and stranding thousands of people in the aftermath, Vice President Kamala Harris was fundraising in California with her Hollywood friends. She was also busy shooting her Vogue cover. The narrative of being a “woman of the people” was shattered — again — in real time as mass suffering was underway in Appalachia. 

When her team finally realized Harris was MIA during a crucial time to show leadership, they put the nominee on Air Force II and headed back to Washington, D.C. On the way, Harris tweeted a photo of her “working on the problem.” Immediately, users on the social media platform noticed the obvious and fake set up. In the photo, Harris sat at a table with earphones in, but not connected to anything, and with a pen next to an empty pad of paper where she pretended to take notes. 

Scrambling to prove her competence, Harris made the decision to be extra involved with the next storm, Hurricane Milton, which was set to hit Florida. 

Harris demanded to speak with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and when he missed her call, she took to the cameras to call him “selfish” while throwing accusations of politicization. 

“Moments of crisis should really be the moment that anyone who calls themselves a leader says they're going to put politics aside and put the people first. People are in desperate need of support right now and playing political games at this moment is just utterly irresponsible and selfish,” Harris said. 

In reality, her accusations were projection, and Harris was desperately trying to make herself relevant. 

For three days, she kept up this charade of “leadership,” demanding briefings from emergency officials and calling into news shows to prove she “cares," all while picking fights with DeSantis in order to prove her power and competence. She had never engaged in hurricane preparation before, and yet, she claimed her involvement was, for some reason, crucial this time around. 

Her motives were cynical and obvious. The effort did not go well. 

"We've been on an emergency footing for two weeks, around the clock, 24/7," DeSantis told “Fox & Friends” during an interview ahead of the storm. "My focus has not been on dealing with Kamala Harris. I saw the news report, I didn't know she tried to contact me but I'd also say, it's not about YOU Kamala. It's about the people of Florida. My focus is exactly where it should be." 

"She has never called on any of the storms we've had since she's been vice president, until apparently now. Why all the sudden is she trying to parachute in and inject herself when she's never shown any interest in the past. We know it's because of politics. We know it's because of her campaign. I have zero time to entertain these political games," he continued. “She isn’t in the chain of command.” 

Even President Joe Biden kept Harris out of the loop, stepping on her media tour with his own press conferences and praise for DeSantis. 

You see, Kamala Harris is desperate to be taken seriously, and yet, she hasn’t done the things necessary to earn America’s respect. 

First, she made her way onto the top of the Democratic presidential ticket by default, not because she earned it. She didn’t make a pitch to voters in a primary about why she’s the best person for the job and what her positions are. The last time she did that, in the 2020 cycle, her campaign crashed and burned, leading to Harris to dropping out before a single vote was cast. 

“You got your candidacy without going through the normal process, that is primary elections or through a caucus. That really caught my attention and inclined me to vote for Trump,” a voter at a Univision town hall told Harris this week. “I’m also concerned about the way President Biden was pushed aside.”

She’s untrustworthy and expects voters to accept that she’s not as far left as she used to be, while also expecting people to buy that her “values have not changed.” 

Kamala Harris has been telling people she's powerful and in command, but as Thatcher said, that's precisely the problem. 

Supreme Court To Hear Arguments in Case That Could Make It Harder for Migrants To Fight Deportation Orders

 Immigration advocates say the case could prevent courts from reviewing federal agency’s decisions.

With immigration being a top issue ahead of the election, the Supreme Court will decide a case that could make it more difficult for migrants to appeal immigration officials’ decisions about who can enter and stay in America. 

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Bouarfa v. Mayorkas, determining whether federal courts can review an agency’s decision to revoke a visa petition. The case could make it harder for migrants to appeal officials’ decisions about whether they can be in the country. 

The case centers around the effort by Amina Bouarfa, who is an American citizen, to get a visa for her husband, Ala’a Hamayel, in 2014. Initially, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services approved the petition, and it appeared Mr. Hamayel was on his way to being able to live in America with his wife and children.

However, two years later, immigration officials informed Ms. Bouarfa that the petition would be revoked because they said they received evidence Mr. Hamayel had entered into a sham marriage to enter America. The allegation was supported by testimony from Mr. Hamayel’s ex-wife; however, she later retracted the claim. 

If officials received information about Mr. Hamayel’s alleged effort to skirt immigration laws through his marriage to his ex-wife, federal law would have required them to deny the petition. However, that decision could have been subject to judicial review as it was based on a nondiscretionary matter. 

Ms. Bouarfa appealed the decision to revoke the visa petition, but she was unable to convince immigration officials to reverse course. A federal district court in Florida heard Ms. Bouarfa’s case. The court upheld the decision because it found the determination to be discretionary, which Congress blocked courts from reviewing. 

The Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit also upheld the decision to revoke the petition, citing immigration laws that allow officials to withdraw a petition for “good and sufficient cause” at any time. The court ruled that even though the petition should have been denied initially as a nondiscretionary decision, the decision to revoke it later was discretionary and, therefore, immune from review by federal courts. 

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an amicus brief in the case, said if the Supreme Court upholds the government’s decision, there could be “devastating consequences for noncitizens and their families.” 

“The government seeks to block federal courts from even considering whether a mistake occurred in many immigration proceedings. And, in some situations, federal courts would be precluded from reviewing even a blatant constitutional violation—such as if the agency based its decision on racial stereotyping,” the ACLU added. 

An attorney with the National Immigration Alliance, Mary Kenney, told the Sun the case could “deprive many noncitizens of the ability to get a fair and independent review” of an immigration agency’s decision. 

The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment. 

Customs and Border Patrol reports there have been around 10 million encounters with migrants at the border trying to enter America since 2021. At the end of 2023, immigration courts had a backlog of more than 3 million cases, which Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse notes is more than the number of people who live at Chicago. 

Many of those cases involve migrants who were apprehended at the border and applied for asylum. In about half of the cases over two decades through 2021, TRAC found judges either granted asylum or provided a form of immigration relief. 

Data from federal immigration officials shows more than 8,000 of the approximately 37,000 migrants held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody have been convicted of crimes. Meanwhile, there are 13,000 migrants convicted of crimes who have not been detained. Overall, an estimated 662,566 migrants with criminal backgrounds are in the country. 

While migrants can appeal deportation orders, Bouarfa v. Mayorkas could make immigration officials’ decisions final and make it harder for illegal migrants to stay in the country. 

With a large backlog of cases, immigration advocates have warned about the potential for officials to make mistakes when determining who can stay in the country. 

Roughly one in five migrants through the 2020 fiscal year appealed decisions made by immigration courts, the Migration Policy Institute reported. Federal courts have tended to overturn decisions due to mistakes made by officials, such as misinterpreting a statute. 

https://www.nysun.com/article/supreme-court-to-hear-arguments-in-case-that-could-make-it-harder-for-migrants-to-fight-deportation-orders

YOUNG WOMEN ROAST KAMALA! 🤣

X22, Red Pill news, and more- Oct 12

 

Is the Biden Campaign Deliberately Sabotaging Kamala Harris and the DNC?

posted by William Sullivan at American Thinker 

When Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi had fully brandished the political knives in July to force Joe Biden out of the presidential race, it was undoubtedly their plan to anoint a successor by way of negotiation among the Democrat establishment.  They would have thereby avoided any populist disruption that could have been caused by primary support for a hard-lined leftist like Bernie Sanders, and could have nominated a moderate with some crossover appeal in the swing states.  Then, the Democrat faithful would rally to the party banner, and the media would have fallen into lockstep in supporting their replacement.

But as we now know, Joe Biden had other plans. He proved to be the gremlin in the gears of the well-oiled DNC political machine when he announced on July 21, a Sunday afternoon, that he was both dropping out of the race and he was endorsing Kamala Harris for president.

The fact that the announcement was made on a Sunday may be a critical point to help us begin understanding the Biden campaign’s motive.  When it comes to which days of the week are most effective to send out a press release, “most experts rule out the weekend,” according to Canadian media intelligence firm, Cision. Sundays are better suited for talk shows with guests than breaking news coverage with primetime anchors, and according to Sprout Social, Sunday is the worst day of the week for social media engagement.

What this Sunday announcement may suggest is that the Biden campaign meant to blindside the party elites who wouldn’t have expected such timing for the announcement.  And that suggestion is all but proven by the fact that the Biden campaign had clearly neglected to inform Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi before he made the announcement.

Immediate evidence after the announcement certainly suggests that these three most influential Democrats weren’t informed beforehand, because none of them rushed to offer their support to Kamala Harris after Biden’s endorsement, signifying a lack of party coordination in the messaging.   As I observed in an article published on American Thinker the day after his announcement, it already seemed clear that Biden had just pulled the pin of a political grenade inside the Democrat tent. 

This was merely a logical assumption at the time, but it was later proven beyond shadows of doubt when Nancy Pelosi said exactly this:

None of us had any idea he would do it that Sunday … So when he did that and endorsed [Kamala Harris], then the thought was everybody wanted an open process.  Let’s see the talent, let’s see the bench of the Democrats and let them come. And see what they can attract.  But when he endorsed her, then it was, “Are you with me or not?”  And she moved quickly.

It was a shocking admission from Nancy Pelosi.  She, Barack Obama, and Chuck Schumer must have been surprised when they had been politically outmaneuvered by Joe Biden, a man who was being forced to abdicate his position on the Democrat ticket because he was so obviously lacking in his cognitive faculties that his continuing as the nominee was an embarrassment to the party.

But the endorsement of Kamala Harris was too much for even the old guard of the DNC to stand against.  Kamala represented the next zenith in the progressive quest to supplant life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with diversity, equity, and inclusion as the driving principles of our nation and its people.  After the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed her immediately, opposing Kamala’s immediate ascent to the nomination quickly became an act of open racism and sexism.

And though it took almost a full week, Pelosi, Schumer, and Obama all succumbed to social and political pressure, and later chose to support Kamala Harris for the nomination, with Obama being the last holdout in doing so.

This was a huge problem for Democrats because Kamala Harris was well known to be among the most uniquely unlikeable and untalented politicians in the Democrat stable.  And few people knew that better on July 21 than her boss, Joe Biden.   

There were plenty of theatrics that followed, suggesting an affection between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  “We love Joe and Jill,” Harris told an audienceafter receiving the endorsement from Biden, “they really are like family.”  “I’m watching ya, kid,” Biden told Harris over a speaker phone, “I love ya.”

And we were all just supposed to buy that.  We were all just meant to believe that Joe Biden thought Kamala Harris would be the best chance for Democrats to win in 2024, filling his shoes and carrying the torch of his legacy onward into the future.    

This would be the same Kamala Harris who was rejected with extreme prejudice by Democrat voters long before the first state primary vote in 2020 because she was so incredibly disagreeable to the party’s constituents.  It’s also the same Kamala Harris who aggressively accused Joe Biden of being a racist who opposed the busing that forced school integration in his early career.  Since this moment, there has been “bad blood between the first lady and the vice president, a feeling so strong that one source describes it as ‘hatred,’” according to the Daily Mail.

And it’s the same Kamala Harris who was, in her short time as a California senator, known for being the most liberal senator in Congress -- even further left than Bernie Sanders.  Joe Biden knows, perhaps better than anyone whose name is not Hillary Clinton, exactly how far the DNC would go to avoid having a leftist radical headline the party ticket and doom them in the swing states.  And yet the Biden administration had endorsed the one candidate that was to the left of Bernie Sanders while having precisely none of his populist appeal?

Anyone paying attention should have always suspected that Joe Biden’s endorsing Kamala Harris was an act of vengeance against the conspirators in his party that led a coup against him.  And the Biden administration’s most recent actions certainly support the notion that he’s continuing to sabotage Kamala Harris and the DNC’s campaign efforts.

But that’s just a “wild theory” being floated by Republicans like Scott Jennings on CNN, the Daily Mail says. 

Is it, though?

Joe Biden famously spent the 2020 presidential campaign in the basement.  During his presidency, he became known for “media evasion,” as Axios calls it, choosing instead to call lids early and often while finding ample time to vacation in Delaware and sleep on the beach. 

But in his final months as president, he’s mustered the energy to go on a busy valedictory tour that is intended to remind American voters that Kamala Harris deserves much of the credit for all of the “accomplishments” of his historically unpopular administration.  “We’re singing from the same song sheet,” he recently said in a White House press briefing, adding that “she was a major player in everything we’ve done.”

And few are more grateful for that messaging than the Trump campaign.  “More Biden is good for us,” a Trump official told Newsweek. 

And just as the Biden campaign didn’t coordinate with the DNC before announcing that he was dropping out and endorsing Harris on a Sunday, the Biden administration didn’t coordinate with the Harris campaign before surprising reporters with his aforementioned, first ever appearance as president in the White House press briefing room at the exact moment that Kamala Harris was at a campaign stop in Detroit where she was touting a vital pause in the dockworkers’ union strike and a promising jobs report.   

Biden was “clearly overshadowing her,” CNN reported afterward.  A CNN anchor wonders if it was “a communications mistake, is the left hand not talking to the right hand in this situation?”

That was last Friday.  On Tuesday of this week, as Kamala Harris was slated to get some much-needed exposure on The View, Biden again stole the spotlight by concurrently holding a presser on Hurricane Milton, during which he attested that he had been working closely with Governor Ron DeSantis.  He attested that the governor has “been cooperative” and is “doing a great job,” totally undermining Kamala Harris who had been complaining that DeSantis wasn’t answering her calls, and that he was “playing political games” while being “selfish” and “irresponsible” in his management of storm resources.

Make of this what you will.  But Democrats are typically masterful in coordinating public messaging in conjunction with the media that are firmly in their pockets.  Either the Biden campaign has been really bad at coordinating with the Kamala Harris campaign and the DNC since July 21 when he announced his withdrawal, or the Biden campaign has been really, really good at not-so-subtly sabotaging their efforts.

Boris Johnson blows up Trump-Russia narrative, silencing CNN's Jake Tapper

 

Tapper served up an opportunity for Johnson to characterize Trump as a Russian stooge. He did the exact opposite.

CNN talking head Jake Tapper gave former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson an opportunity this week to help the American media establishment advance its latest Trump-Russia smear.

Johnson, whose time as prime minister and foreign secretary overlapped Trump's first four years in the White House, not only proved unwilling to cosign the narrative but highlighted President Donald Trump's historic efforts to keep Russia in check — something the Biden-Harris administration has alternatively had difficulty with.

Johnson went on CNN to promote his new memoir, "Unleashed." While nominally interested in discussing the former prime minister's book, Tapper appeared far more intent on exploring some of the more sensational allegations in Bob Woodward's forthcoming book, particularly the disputed claim — from yet another unnamed source — that Trump has spoken to Putin as many as seven times since leaving the White House.

 

Democratic operatives and the liberal media are desperate to make something of this allegation. Former Obama U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, for instance, gladly leaped to the conclusion Tuesday that Trump had violated the Logan Act, thereby committing a crime.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has also given the rumor oxygen, claiming, "If it is true, it is indeed concerning."

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told The Hill, "None of ... these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true," adding that Woodward "suffers from a debilitating case of Trump derangement syndrome."

Woodward might have a chip on his shoulder on account of the president's $50 million lawsuit for releasing audio recordings of their interviews without consent.

"CNN is also reporting that in Woodward's book, according to a Trump aide, there have been multiple phone calls between former President Trump and Vladimir Putin. Maybe as many as seven since Trump left the White House in 2021," said Tapper. "What's your reaction to that?"

"I don't know if that's true, and I'm certainly not privy to the contents of those sorts of conversations," said Johnson.

"What I can tell our viewers is that when I had dealings with President Trump over Russia, like when the Russians poisoned people in the U.K., it was actually the Trump administration that really ... exceeded expectations. They expelled 60 Russian spies. It was the Trump administration that actually gave Ukrainians lethal weaponry — the Javelin missiles to use against Putin's troops."

After Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal and his adult daughter were poisoned in 2018, Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats whom his administration identified as intelligence agents. He also had the Russian consulate in Seattle closed.

'Had he been president in 2022, there would have been no Russian invasion of Ukraine.'

As for the Javelins, Trump approved a plan to send the anti-tank missile systems to Ukraine in December 2017 — a step that former President Barack Obama had avoided, even when Russia annexed Crimea under his watch.

There was a pregnant silence after Johnson concluded his defense of Trump's record on Russia. Tapper then awkwardly changed the topic to the prime minister's book.

This is not the first time in recent days that the former prime minister has defended Trump.

In a recent interview with Britain's Times Radio, Johnson suggested Putin would not have invaded Ukraine on Trump's watch.

"I happen to believe that when Donald Trump says that had he been president in 2022, there would have been no Russian invasion of Ukraine, my view is that that is a credible assertion. I really do think that's credible," said Johnson.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/boris-johnson-blows-up-trump-russia-narrative-silencing-cnns-jake-tapper?utm_campaign=october11morningnote&utm_medium=email&utm_source=iterable&utm_content=morningnote

 

Was the Afghan Refugee’s Election Day Jihad Plot a CIA Fake?

Was the Afghan Refugee’s Election Day Jihad Plot a CIA Fake?

Much more going on than meets the eye . . .

October 11, 2024 by Robert Spencer for 

Frontpage Magazine 

An Afghan refugee in Oklahoma City was just caught plotting an Election Day jihad massacre. The Justice Department announced this on Tuesday, and there was no reason to doubt it. After all, Afghanistan is a hotbed of jihad.

The accused perpetrator, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, got into the United States on a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), which is only issued to people who aided American forces while they were in that country, so he might have been assumed not to be a jihadi. Still, he could have been practicing Muhammad’s dictum “War is deceit” or imbibed jihadi sympathies after he helped American troops.

Now, however, it has come to light that he worked for the CIA, which casts doubt upon every other aspect of this story.

The New York Post reported last Thursday that Tawhedi, “who was nabbed in Oklahoma on Monday over the alleged terror plot, was employed as a security guard for the agency but was not a CIA informant.” The Post’s report adds that “it wasn’t immediately clear when or how long Tawhedi worked security before he came to the U.S. in 2021 — just weeks after the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan and the last U.S. troops departed from the war-torn nation. It also wasn’t known if there were signs Tawhedi had ties to radical Islam before he entered the U.S.”

What’s the big deal? He was just a security guard, right? That hardly means that he was the Afghan version of Agent 007. Sure, but when the CIA is involved, it’s impossible to dismiss the suspicion that there is more going on here than meets the eye. The agency, like all other intelligence agencies around the world, is not exactly open and honest about who exactly works for it and what they actually do.

Back in the early years after 9/11, I spoke at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a few times. The agents all had nameplates giving only their first names, in contrast to the full names that were on the nameplates when I spoke at the FBI. During a break, one CIA agent told me a funny story about how he told a woman he was dating that he worked at the State Department, only to be stuck next to her in traffic the next day all the way to Langley, where she saw him turn into the CIA parking lot. So in this case, can we be sure that Nasir Tawhedi was just a low-level security guard? No. We can’t be sure of anything at all.

Sometimes it seems as if we can trust absolutely nothing that our governing authorities and the establishment media tell us. That may (or may not) be a wild exaggeration, but those in positions of public trust have no one but themselves to blame for the widespread and increasing suspicion. They’ve been discovered to be dishonest about so very much (remember all the falsehoods that have been attached to Donald Trump: Russian collusion, “insurrection,” rape, fraud, and so very many others) that it’s hard to assume that they’re being aboveboard and honest about literally anything.

For years, leftists have charged that U.S. intelligence agencies have grossly exaggerated the jihad threat, even to the point of fabricating jihad plots by entrapping unstable individuals, manipulating them into agreeing to participate in plots when they never would have done so on their own. The reality of the jihad worldwide made this claim unlikely, but when we learn that an accused jihadi worked for the CIA, it raises these questions all over again.

There is, after all, no good way to spin this. Tawhedi could be a CIA agent and his Election Day jihad plot is fake, perhaps fabricated in order to make Americans afraid to head to the polls and more accepting of mail-in ballots, which can be so easily used to commit election fraud. Alternatively, Tawhedi is a bona fide jihadi who worked as a security guard for the CIA, indicating that the vaunted intelligence agency is incapable of recognizing jihadis even when they’re standing at their own gates.

Either way, it’s bad. And even worse, we will likely never get the full truth of this matter. There is no doubt whatsoever that there are Islamic jihadis who are actively plotting to murder Americans. In these dark days of the Biden-Harris regime, however, there is also no doubt that government agencies have been weaponized for political purposes. Was Nasir Tawhedi’s Election Day plot another manifestation of this corruption? We need answers but aren’t going to get them.

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Kamala Harris Doubles Down On Facilitating Biden’s Border Invasion If Elected

Shawn Fleetwood reporting for The Federalist 

During a Univision town hall on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris doubled down on furthering the ongoing invasion at the U.S. southern border if elected president this November.

The moment came when a prospective voter questioned Harris about what she would do to support noncitizens who have resided in the United States “for years.” The Democrat nominee bragged about how “the first” piece of legislation the Biden-Harris administration sent to Congress was a bill that, among many things, sought to provide amnesty to illegal immigrants within the country.

Referred to by the White House as the U.S. Citizenship Act, the measure specifically would have allowed foreign nationals residing in the United States prior to Jan. 1, 2021, “to apply for temporary legal status, with the ability to apply for green cards after five years if they pass criminal and national security background checks and pay their taxes.” After a three-year waiting period, “all green card holders who pass additional background checks and demonstrate knowledge of English and U.S. civics can apply to become citizen.”

But Harris didn’t stop there. She went on to lament the death of a “border security bill” introduced by bipartisan members of Congress earlier this year, a bill that would have enshrined the existing invasion at the U.S.-Mexico border into law.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” Harris claimed. “And Donald Trump found out about that bill, realized it would be a solution, and told them not to put it on the floor for a vote because he would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

As The Federalist has repeatedly noted, the vice president’s claim that the bill would have stopped the influx of illegal immigration across the southern border is a lie. In fact, the legislation specifically guaranteed thousands of illegal aliens would be allowed into the United States via the border every day,

As David Harsanyi wrote in these pages, that amounts to (at least) “nearly 2 million entries per year.”

When responding to a separate question later in the town hall, Harris reaffirmed her support for granting the millions of illegal immigrants in the United States amnesty, saying we must “do the work of focusing on what we must do to have an orderly and humane pathway to earn citizenship” for noncitizens.

As vice president and “border czar,” Harris has presided over what is arguably the worst illegal immigration crisis in modern U.S. history. According to an October 2023 report by the Washington Examiner, an estimated 10 million illegal aliens have unlawfully entered the United States since Biden and Harris took office in January 2021.

Most recently, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed in a letter to Congress that more than 647,000 illegal immigrants convicted or suspected of sexual assault, homicide, and other heinous crimes are roaming free in the United States. That communique came days after retired Chief Border Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke claimed in testimony before Congress that Biden-Harris administration officials told him he “could not release any names or information” to the American public on the increase of illegal aliens with “significant ties to terrorism” who were apprehended at the southern border.

Heitke contended the administration’s purpose in withholding such information was to “convince the public there was no threat at the border.”

The Growing DEI Threat to Intelligence Agencies

The Growing DEI Threat to Intelligence Agencies

By: John A Gentry for American Thinker

“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) policies are not only ethically controversial features of modern life, they damage key American institutions. My new book on the impact of DEI on U.S. intelligence agencies demonstrates conclusively that DEI has seriously damaged the operational performance of U.S. intelligence agencies, thereby endangering national security. This is the first major study of the national security intelligence implications of DEI policies. Details differ but root causes and main negative influences are similar to the problems DEI policies have caused in business, the Defense Department, and universities.

This also is a political issue. Vice President Kamala Harris helped preside over a significant worsening of the damage in the Biden years. She supports DEI policies and can be expected to push them further if she is elected in November. President Trump largely ignored the issue in 2017-2021, enabling the negative effects of DEI to institutionalize and deepen, but candidate Trump and his advisors in 2024 say they recognize the error and promise to address DEI firmly if he is elected next month.

Permeating universities and deeply entrenched in American businesses, DEI has been a core feature of federal government personnel policies since the Obama years. In addition to asserting their value as devices to right societal wrongs and promote “social justice,” Obama and Biden administration officials have claimed that DEI policies improve the performance of the intelligence community (IC). Writing In 2021, I found no empirical support for such claims by then director of national intelligence James Clapper and others. In part due to assertions by readers that actual consequences are grim, I decided to research directly the operational consequences -- positive and negative -- of DEI policies on the IC. A new article summarizes both the claims and the operational effects of DEI.

Much public information and interviews with several dozen current and former intelligence officers, mainly from the CIA, indicate definitively that operational implications of DEI policies have been negative in five major related arenas, which build on each other. First, senior IC leaders, especially CIA director John Brennan, invoked the possible threat to DEI policies that candidate and then President Trump posed in 2016 and later to encourage political activism by intelligence officers, which among serving intelligence officers primarily took the form of leaks of both accurate and purposefully incorrect information (or disinformation) designed to damage Trump and his administration. This was a massive violation of the longstanding and very important CIA ethic of apolitical public service.

Second, the heavy-handed orthodoxy of DEI is causing significant self-censorship by government personnel who do not support the DEI agenda, just as it does in academia. For example, a now retired senior CIA manager of analysts wrote while he was still working: “As the workforce has gotten larger, so has diversity. Political correctness rules. With the increased political divide, it is hard to be outspoken. We choose our close colleagues carefully.” A currently serving intelligence analyst at an agency other than the CIA understatedly said in 2024, “DEI policies have been a distraction from our core mission.” Another senior officer at an agency other than the CIA assessed the operational implications of DEI policies summarized by saying “it negatively affects our mission.”  

Third, numerous current and former CIA operations officers have described many ways in which DEI policies have hampered field operations. These include weaker CIA recruits, bad management, tolerance of weak performance in the name of protecting diversity, and the ideological divisions described above.

Fourth, DEI is an ideological bias that has affected the organizational cultures of analytic elements, biasing analyses in ways intended to influence the way intelligence personnel think, which affects analysis and helps generate intelligence failures. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2023 published an internal magazine called The Dive that explicitly tells employees what to think about race, LGBTQ+, and disability issues. CIA’s analytic “review processes” for many years were designed to find and expunge biases of all sorts from published analyses. In sharp contrast, the Biden administration is telling employees to adopt biases that are politically correct. We know that such biases in the past have generated analytic errors that sometimes generate appreciable intelligence failures.

Fifth, political activism of intelligence officers -- overtly, via leaks, and by tailoring analysis in partisan ways -- has led many Americans to think increasingly poorly of intelligence, especially of the political activism of intelligence officers. These include perceptions of intelligence by its users, including senior decisionmakers. No small number of Republicans, in particular, think that the IC tried to conduct a “coup” against then-president Trump. Intelligence that is not believed or trusted is not used operationally, damaging the perceived usefulness of intelligence. A lack of use of good intelligence is likely to damage the quality of national decision-making.  

The IC’s main clients, or “customers” in current parlance, are senior government decisionmakers, but the intelligence agencies rely on taxpayer funding and ought to serve the public by improving national security decision-making. The agencies have long sought to both inform citizens in general terms about a secretive part of their government and to woo public opinion as an aid to furthering their own parochial interests. Another operational result of DEI-motivated political activism is diminished confidence in the trustworthiness of the agencies, which means diminished faith in the accuracy and integrity of intelligence assessments that presidents and other senior decisionmakers use to make and rationalize their foreign policy judgments. Given the strong evidentiary basis for politicization and worse, it is no surprise that public confidence in intelligence is declining. A Rasmussen poll released in October 2023 found that only 36 percent of American voters believed that intelligence agencies behaved in an impartial manner, while 51 percent said the agencies have their own political agendas. And 65 percent believed it likely that the agencies are influencing corporate media’s coverage of political issues. Another Rasmussen poll released in March 2024 showed that most Americans think the IC is trying to influence the 2024 presidential election. There is good reason for such worry.

While we can document much damage to the agencies' operations, assessing the consequences for national security is harder. Outsiders, especially, cannot tell the extent or consequences of poor presidential decision-making fostered by poor intelligence. We can be confident that the intelligence services of America’s adversaries are watching the slow self-destruction of the CIA and other agencies with glee, and that they will exploit weaknesses they see at future times of their choosing.

John A. Gentry is a former CIA analyst and author of Diversity Dysfunction: The DEI Threat to National Security Intelligence.Follow him at @gentry_johna. Write to him at gentry.ja49@gmail.com.

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