Director Kimberly Cheatle is accused of being a box-ticking variety use, a result of the Secret Service’s problems in the near-assassination of former president Donald Trump. This Washington Examiner line, Alphabet Soup, may take a closer look at whether the La chickens have come home to nest in the federal government, whether the private market has finally had enough, and if the much-maligned term is here to stay or if it will just turn into something else entirely. The state DEI’s impact on politics will be the focus of Part One.
In recent months, initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion have received a bad rap in the public eye, from the public sector to corporate governance, but the current assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump raised more serious questions about the ideology’s desire to fess out in favor of unchanging traits like race.
In the aftereffects of the test on Trump’s existence, which left one dead and others, including Trump, injured, observers noted how a seemingly overwhelming number of women, who were considerably smaller in stature than Trump, were on his individual Secret Service details. Even more troubling is the fact that several of the women on the information received a lot of negative comments for coming off as confused, anxious, and unsure of what they were doing. The Secret Service’s prior efforts to promote variety as a major concern have since been subjected to attention.
” That iconic photograph of Donald Trump I do n’t think would have been possible if the person on the camera side of him had been a male”, Dr. Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Examiner. That individual would have been large and shielding the government’s face, they said.
La ideology, which prioritizes characteristics like gender and race over merit, has become a staple in the federal government. As a camera for hiring and promotion, the now questionable philosophy was injected earlier on into the Biden administration’s targets, with a June 25, 2021, professional order enshrining a determination to DEI across the state. Following a second order signed his first day in office, which urged him to “achieve racial equity.”
Decades ago, Lipson pointed out that DEI may have on its face been intended to assist middle-class minorities in getting an “initial push” into college or success outside the socioeconomic class in which they grew up. All too frequently, however, the initiatives end up setting those people up for failure because the intended beneficiaries end up being underqualified and performing either at school or in the workforce.
The DEI mentality has had cross-governmental effects, many of which highlight the limitations and failures of promoting personnel for diversity features as opposed to merit.
The leaders of the biggest fighting force in the world were more focused on hiring men in high heels, according to Mark Serrano, a Republican strategist and president of Proactive Communications, who spoke to the Washington Examiner.” U.S. service members were lost on Joe Biden’s watch during the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. A bald, lipstick-wearing serial thief who was caught stealing designer luggage was left with control of our nuclear power plants. A trans assistant secretary of health supports ‘ gender-affirming care’ for minors, saying it’s’ safe, medically necessary.'”
Serrano referred to Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Sam Brinton, a former deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposal in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
Both are viewed by critics as being DEI hires because Brinton asserts that she is gender neutral and that she was a “nonbinary drag queen appointed to Office of Nuclear Energy” upon her appointment. Brinton’s DOE description for a nuclear energy position touted him as a “well-known advocate for LGBTQ youth …]who] helped to secure protections against the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy in more than half of the country. They use the pronouns they, them, and theirs to describe themselves as gender-fluid.
After being detained for stealing luggage from various airports on numerous grand larceny counts, Brinton was forced to leave the position. The incident spawned significant negative headlines and political headaches for the Biden administration.
Levine, a biological man who identify as a woman, is still employed by HHS, but he has consistently argued that children should be given irreversible gender transition treatments as soon as possible. Despite the extensive and expanding body of medical evidence showing that minors ‘ outcomes are either unknown or dangerous, Levine was caught pressuring the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which regulates medical standards of care, to remove age restrictions for sex-change surgeries.
” DE I hiring is an abject failure as a social experiment with growing proof,” Serrano said. ” Biden changed fundamental, merit-based standards that any employer would apply and continues to , circumvent federal law , to infuse his radical leftism into hiring policy. Three years later, we witness the abominable effects of this policy that have resulted in the deaths of Americans.
Biden himself cited race as a defining trait in a recent interview, claiming to have forgotten Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and calling him” a black man” who “runs that outfit over there.” He also highlighted the race of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom he nominated in 2022 after limiting the candidate pool to exclusively black women, in line with DEI ideology.
Criticism has attributed a large portion of the blame to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who has vigorously pursued DEI as a key component of the organization, for the security failures at the rally where Trump was shot. For instance, she previously made it clear that she wanted to make sure that 30 % of the Secret Service workforce was made up of women by 2030.
” Now we see more lives have been lost through the actions of an agency sworn with the solemn duty to protect national leaders where the agency head set a 30 % by 2030 mandate for hiring Secret Service women”, Serrano said. ” Why 30 %?” Why not just 50 % or 60 %? The truth is DEI in and of itself goes against nature and good hiring policy and is not sustainable at any level”.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) called Cheatle herself a” DE I hire,” and Christopher Rufo, a prominent DEI critic, argued that the “near-miss assassination reminds us of the stakes: split-second reactions, physical courage, and calm under pressure are all essential to the work of protecting the president. If any of those sag, even by an inch, the end result is death. What we saw on Saturday was luck, not competence”.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA ) joined a chorus of many others on Thursday morning who were calling for Cheatle’s ouster.
On a podcast in 2023, Loucious Hires III, the agency’s equity chief, spoke on and on the agency’s commitment to the ideology, stating,” I could talk on and on what the agency is doing to promote , diversity, equity, and inclusion. … DEI is every action every day”.
” Being open and speaking openly about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility is one of the things we need to continue to do,” Hires continued. We have succeeded in achieving our ultimate goal when each member of this organization can declare that this is a mission imperative.
The whole-of-government DEI push has rippling effects outside the Secret Service — while still affecting life-and-death situations.
For instance, the Federal Aviation Administration made DEI hiring top of mind for air traffic controllers, so earlier this year 11 state attorneys general wrote to agency Administrator Michael Whitaker complaining that the agency “appears to prioritize virtue-signaling’diversity’ efforts over aviation expertise.”
The letter noted that nearly doubled in near collisions with commercial aircraft over the past ten years were caused by a system failure that caused thousands of flights to be delayed last year.
The Department of Defense has also prioritized DEI. The Navy was exposed last year for using a drag queen as its digital recruitment ambassador. Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, a man who donned the woman’s outfit and went by the name” Harpy Daniels,” used his drag performance to entice new online recruits. Military recruitment numbers continue to be down across the board.
Charles Q. Brown, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was the Air Force’s chief of staff at the time, laid out explicit percentage goals for what appeared to be racial and gender quotas in the service branch, despite the Air Force’s defense that they are quotas because they are against the law.
Much in the same way that one would not want a surgeon who was chosen based on race or gender but rather skill and merit, Lipson explained, personnel in critical positions should not be chosen that way either. The professor continued,” Putting in place a DEI-oriented regime actually sows distrust in those who are relying on the surgeon, the air traffic controller, or the fellow soldier because they know that person may not actually be the best suited for the position.”
Even those who appear qualified for positions may still enter them motivated by DEI and other narrowly ideological objectives, thereby obstructing an organization or position to become incompetent.
Cheatle, for example, spent 27 years in the Secret Service, becoming, as Biden’s nomination announcement highlighted, the” first woman in the role of Assistant Director of protective operations”. Prior to obtaining his current position in the Air Force, Brown spent his entire career there. He rose to the top of the branch’s ranks. Jackson previously served on a U.S. district court between 2013 and 2014 before moving to an appeals court until her appointment to the country’s high court.
Jackson for her part, penned a lengthy defense of DEI principles in her dissent in the Supreme Court case that overturned affirmative action.
According to Lipson, even qualified individuals who are motivated primarily by a desire to carry out DEI goals can fail to do their jobs effectively. He referred to former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, who was notorious for pushing DEI-oriented military initiatives. Milley was not a DEI hire.
” When you pick people because they fit some racial or ethnic criteria and they do n’t do the job well, you face a real problem in firing them because then you’ll look as if you’re attacking that group”, Lipson said.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who has received criticism for her handling of her job, is reportedly doing just that because the political implications of firing the first black lesbian in the position seem to be the same. Some Democratic aides have criticized her for handling her job.
After many people had grown frustrated with her tendency to read directly from her briefing binder and failure to create a sense of honesty, the White House officials made an unsuccessful attempt to remove Jean-Pierre, according to the New York Post. A source told the outlet that White House chief of staff Jeff Zients and senior communications adviser Anita Dunn “were trying to find Karine a graceful exit” due to the optics around forcing her out.
The White House denied that Jean-Pierre had been ousted. However, the failure to remove her highlights both the ideological stranglehold and the underlying merit concerns that are related to the ideology.
Taken together, the perception of failed and controversial DEI initiatives from the Biden administration has accelerated criticism of the ideology on the Right.
In recent days, Vice President Kamala Harris has come under even harsher scrutiny because of pressure on Biden to end his reelection campaign and allow Harris or another Democrat to seek the presidency instead.
The Democratic campaign’s attempt to remove Biden from the ticket has been hampered by Harris ‘ perceived shortcomings as a replacement candidate and commander in chief. In 2020, when the nation was gripped by the George Floyd riots, then-candidate Biden had already committed to choosing a woman to be his running mate. The Biden campaign was under intense pressure to choose a black woman as the riotous summer progressed, and Harris was chosen because Biden had previously called her racist.
Harris has been given some problem areas, the majority of which are aimed at addressing the “root causes” of the previous illegal immigration. Her efforts on that assignment, given in the early months of the Biden administration, have not been fruitful, adding to the criticism of her selection as vice president.
The Border Patrol union posted to X last year that “you should be fired and replaced if you were given a job two years ago with the explicit goal of reducing illegal immigration, and then you sit around and do nothing while illegal immigration explodes to levels never seen before.”
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Zients, apparently unable to recall during a recent magazine interview if Biden had even one time relied on Harris for guidance, noted that Harris’s contribution to the administration’s response to the coronavirus was that she was instrumental in making “equity” an essential part of it.
According to RealClearPolitics, 54 % of the country disapproves of her, and only 39 % approve. Harris’s ratings for approval are also disappointing.
