Harsh critique charges ‘Marxian’ DEI policies wrecked U.S. intelligence agencies

FPI / November 27, 2024

Geostrategy-Direct

From Day One, the Biden Administration, continuing policy initiated in the Obama years, ordered every U.S. government entity to make diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) a top priority in the hiring of personnel.

That “Marxian” DEI focus produced poor spies and analysts that damaged effectiveness of the CIA and other American intelligence agencies and is undermining national security, according to a new book by a former CIA analyst.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, left, and ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, among others, aggressively pursued political agendas in opposition to former President Trump from 2016 to 2021, former CIA analyst John A. Gentry said. / AP

The book, “Diversity Dysfunction: The DEI Threat to National Security Intelligence,” documents “the extensive damage that DEI policies of the Obama and Biden administrations have done to U.S. intelligence, and it speculates about the resultant damage to national security,” said author John A. Gentry, who spent 12 years as an analyst with the CIA.

For his opposition to DEI, Gentry said he was “canceled” as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

DEI policies, Gentry said, were not put in place to address fairness or social justice issues but were imposed based on ideological reasons.

“They were enacted for Marxian ideological reasons with the goal of fundamentally and permanently changing the organizational cultures of the agencies and, in the Biden years, the U.S. government as a whole,” Gentry said in a Washington Times interview with  security correspondent Bill Gertz.

Gentry describes DEI in the book as an ideology-based political agenda with philosophical roots in neo-Marxist critical theory developed in the 1920s at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

Advocates became known as the “Frankfurt School,” and many of its leaders moved to the United States and began instructing generations of American intellectuals. The central theme is that a Marxist transformation of society could be carried through culture and infiltrating the institutions of civic life.

Marxist-based diversity policies seek to create and enhance divisions within groups of people and were accelerated under President Barack Obama, Gentry said.

Obama promoted policies of preferential treatment for favored domestic demographic “identity” groups, including blacks, women, and LGBTQ people. They came to be known as the “Obama Coalition” of supporters in the Democratic Party.

The policies continued in the Biden Administration and led to the identity groups thinking and acting alike. The ironic result was a sharp drop in the intellectual diversity within the society and in the intelligence agencies, Gentry said.

“Obama and Biden and their subordinates have practiced critical race theory by employing DEI dogma to reshape the federal bureaucracy and instilled political activism in federal employees along with commitment to DEI principles,” he stated.

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