The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex by Thomas Hackett

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/02/14/the_sudden_dominance_of_the_diversity_industrial_complex_880202.html

Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life. 

They are now. 

The “diversity industrial complex” has arisen suddenly, with no fanfare on the order of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of a “military industrial complex” in his farewell address.
Wikipedia

Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution – including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands – has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning. From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.  

Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations and accrediting associations that support their efforts. 

“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”   

Diversity, equity and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms). 

Yet however defined, it’s clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.

James Clapper Can’t Stop Lying He knew exactly what he was doing. By: David Harsanyi

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/14/james-clapper-cant-stop-lying/

In an interview with The Washington Post’s “fact checker,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper contends that Politico misled the public about a letter he and 50 other former intel officials signed during the 2020 presidential campaign warning that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story could be Russian deception. “There was message distortion,” Clapper tells The Washington Post. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”

It was not clear, at all. The purpose of the letter, apparent then as it is now, was to discredit the Post’s scoop and provide Democrats and the media with ammunition to reject it. Of course intel officials couldn’t definitively say that Hunter’s emails, which implicated Joe Biden as a business partner, were concocted by Putin’s spooks. They had no access to the laptop. The purpose was to enlist former intel chiefs to cast doubt on the story. A perfunctory CYA paragraph doesn’t change anything.

The laptop lie began, as is often the case, with Adam Schiff, the California congressman who used the intelligence committee as a partisan disinfo clearinghouse. As soon as the story broke, Schiff claimed that “we know” — a phrase he used numerous times — that the emails had been planted by the Kremlin. By then, though, everyone understood the congressman was an irredeemable liar. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, issued a statement stressing that, actually, there was no evidence to back Schiff’s claims.

That’s when Natasha Bertrand, the dependable Dem dupe who had passed along so many other fake stories for the intel establishment, “reported” in Politico that more than 50 former senior intelligence officials had signed a letter asserting that the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The most notable signees were Clapper, a man who ran a domestic surveillance program and then lied about it to Congress, and former CIA director John Brennan, a man who once oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a Senate staffer, and then also lied about it to the American people.

Genocide in Nigeria: The Biden Administration’s Cover-Up by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19402/genocide-in-nigeria

[T]he Biden administration’s decision to delist Nigeria from the list of Countries of Particular Concern was “inexplicable,” according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom

Christians are being butchered — “purged” — in Nigeria at an alarming rate.

In 2022 alone, 90% of all Christians around the world who were killed for their faith… were slaughtered in Nigeria. On average, that is 14 Christians killed for their faith every day in Nigeria — at least one Christian every two hours.

In just the first month of 2023, in January alone, Muslims slaughtered approximately 60 Christians in Nigeria, raided churches, and kidnapped women and children.

[O]n January 31, 2023, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), introduced a bipartisan resolution calling for not only the return of Nigeria to the State Department’s CPC list, but for the appointment of a special ambassador to monitor the situation.

“[The Fulani] demonstrated a clear intent to target Christians and symbols of Christian identity such as churches, and, during attacks, shouted ‘Allah u Akbar,’ ‘destroy the infidels,’ and ‘wipe out the infidels.’… [Despite this] the Department of State mischaracterizes or incompletely characterizes the increasing incidents of large scale violence … [as] solely attributable to competition for scarce natural resources resulting from climate change.” — U.S. House Resolution “Expressing the sense of Congress regarding the need to designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern.”

The new resolution also, rather refreshingly, calls out Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari—himself a Fulani, who “has favored and promoted fellow Fulani and other northern Muslim ethnic groups,” while others, chief among them Christians, “are denied equal rights.”

“It’s tough to tell Nigerian Christians this isn’t a religious conflict since what they see are Fulani fighters clad entirely in black, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and screaming ‘Death to Christians.'” — Sister Monica Chikwe, Nigerian nun, cruxnow.com, August 4, 2019.

[B]y removing Nigeria from the CPC list in November, 2021, the Biden administration was simply returning to the status quo. Although jihadists had slaughtered and terrorized Nigeria’s Christians all during President Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure, when Biden was his Vice President (2009-2017), and although the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom had, beginning in 2009 and every year afterwards, repeatedly urged that Nigeria be designated as a Country of Particular Concern, the Obama administration had obstinately refused to comply.

It was only in 2020, under the Trump administration, that Nigeria was first designated as a CPC — only to be removed the following year under Biden.

‘The Global Getaway’: More Empty Promises from the EU? by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19400/eu-global-getaway-china

The Global Gateway project was launched in December 2021. Meanwhile, China’s BRI was launched in 2012 and has spread all over the globe, especially to Africa, Latin America and Asia, where it has gained China vast influence. The Communist Party newspaper China Daily recently claimed that in 2022 alone, China had signed new contracts with BRI countries worth nearly $100 billion.

As of March 2022, the number of countries around the world that have joined the BRI by signing a Memorandum of Understanding with China was 147, according to the Green Finance and Development Center at Fudan University in Shanghai. Forty-three of those countries were in sub-Saharan Africa and another 18 countries were in North Africa and the Middle East.

The US Center for Global Development has criticized the Global Gateway program as a “mere packaging exercise of things that have already been programmed,” and saying that the €300 billion promised in new investments is not new at all.

The Global Gateway project is “a strategy to put together what was already going to happen and present it as something new, and if our partners are tricked by this then more fool them”. — Barry Andrews, an Irish member of the European Parliament, December 15, 2022.

“While China has roads, bridges and dams to show for its 20-year-engagement with Africa… the EU brings red tape and a lecture.” — African view of Global Gateway, Euractiv, December 20, 2021.

Since 1991, China’s foreign ministers have made it a tradition always to travel to Africa on their first trip abroad in the New Year. This year, China’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang visited Ethiopia, Gabon, Angola, Benin and Egypt in a week-long tour.

“Who listens and understands the context in which African countries are operating is going to be the better development partner… The EU is the one that doesn’t listen…. Was there consultation with African partners leading up to the global gateway? Zero.” — Ovigwe Eguegu, Nigerian policy adviser at consultancy Development Reimagined, Euractiv, December 20, 2021.

“Beijing has long viewed African countries as occupying a central position in its efforts to increase China’s global influence and revise the international order…” — US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2020 Report to Congress.

It has been just over a year since the European Union launched its Global Gateway infrastructure project to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

A trio of new intrusions leaves America’s leaders grasping for explanations by Stephen Collinson

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/politics/unknown-objects-leaders-response/index.html 

A deepening national security mystery is threatening a political storm after US fighter jets scrambled three days in a row to shoot down a trio of unidentified aerial objects high over the North American continent.

The flurry of attacks on the unknown crafts came a week after the highly public tracking and ultimate downing of a Chinese balloon suspected of carrying out surveillance. Now, the thin details trickling out of the Pentagon and Capitol Hill about are making an already highly unusual international episode even more bizarre and confusing.

No one – not the White House, the Pentagon or the government of Canada, whose airspace has also been infringed – seems able to say exactly what is going on with these latest downed crafts. This raises questions for top military brass and US spy agencies as well as for the potential safety of civilian aviation. And it creates an information vacuum that Republicans are again using to question President Joe Biden’s leadership.

The intrigue is also unfolding against a tense global situation, with already difficult relations with rising superpower China becoming ever more hostile and with the US leading the West in an effective proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

“What’s gone on in the last two weeks or so, 10 days, has been nothing short of craziness,” Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS, hours before an airborne object was shot down over Lake Huron.

“The military needs to have a plan to not only determine what’s out there, but (to) determine the dangers that go with it,” Tester said.

With the North American Aerospace Defense Command on heightened alert, US fighters have now blasted three objects out of the skies since Friday following the shooting down of the Chinese balloon off the South Carolina coast on February 4:

In the latest event, a high-altitude object was shot down on Sunday afternoon by an F-16 over Lake Huron, which lies between Michigan and Ontario. The Pentagon said the object was not assessed to be a military threat but was a flight hazard. But it did connect the craft to a radar signal picked up earlier over Montana, the home to US intercontinental missile silos and other sensitive sites.
On Saturday, a US F-22 warplane operating on the joint orders of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Biden fired a missile that took down an object flying at 40,000 feet over central Yukon in the far north of Canada. Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand described a “cylindrical object” smaller than the Chinese balloon.
On Friday, an F-22 shot down another unidentified craft over Alaskan airspace. US pilots were able to get up around the object before it was shot down and reported that it didn’t appear to be carrying surveillance equipment.

China’s Balloon Reveals the Weaknesses in US National Security Decision-Making by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19399/china-balloon-us-weakness

If China perceives that the America’s leaders lack resolve or that its national security decision-makers are divided, these failures can only tempt Chinese aggression against Siberia or Taiwan. After watching America’s debacles in Afghanistan and a week of hosting the balloon, China must be asking: If not now, when?

These reconnaissance flights seem but one dimension of a vast, multidimensional intelligence-collection effort by China.

The most important lesson China might have learned, unfortunately, is that Washington’s bungled balloon performance could well be replicated if Communist China’s President Xi Jinping invaded Taiwan or other targets.

The second-most damaging impact to US security regarding spy balloon that the Chinese Communist Party floated over the entire US continent may have been the assessment that China’s decision-makers gleaned from the perceived clumsy and indecisive manner in which America’s political and military leaders responded to the incident.

China, flaunting a lack of respect for the US, publicly ridiculed the balloon’s shoot-down and did not answer the phone when US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called. If China perceives that the America’s leaders lack resolve or that its national security decision-makers are divided, these failures can only tempt Chinese aggression against Siberia or Taiwan. After watching America’s debacles in Afghanistan and a week of hosting the balloon, China must be asking: If not now, when?

The saga of China’s balloon, as well as other unidentified objects in the skies over the US and Canada, only adds to the confused and feckless decision-making process of America’s political military leadership. Why, as reported, did the Pentagon brass really not follow Biden’s order to shoot down the balloon immediately after the White House was notified?

THE STATE OF ANTISEMITISM IN AMERICA

https://www.ajc.org/AntisemitismReport2022

American Jewish Committee’s annual State of Antisemitism in America report assesses and compares Jewish and general population perceptions of and experiences with antisemitism in the United States. Based on one of the largest-ever combined national surveys of American Jews and the U.S. general public, the report demonstrates the deeply disturbing impact that rising hatred of Jews has on America’s Jewish community.

The release of the data, from surveys done in Fall of 2022, comes two months after the White House announced the creation of a new federal interagency group that will develop a national strategy to combat antisemitism.

Use the links below to view the report results of each survey, a comparison between the two surveys, AJC’s analysis, and AJC resources to combat antisemitism.

For too many American Jews, being Jewish no longer feels as safe as it once did. And the younger those American Jews are, the more they experience that threat firsthand.

An American Jewish Committee (AJC) study released this week sheds light on that heartbreaking reality and more. How affected are American Jews by rising antisemitism? Does the general public understand the weight they carry?

Based on parallel surveys of American Jews and the U.S. general public on their perceptions and experiences of antisemitism in the U.S, AJC’s State of Antisemitism in America Report 2022 is the most comprehensive of its kind. 

Here are five key takeaways from the report.

Did a Government Intel Asset Plant Key Evidence in Proud Boys Case? We should be suspicious of weird coincidences. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/13/did-a-government-intel-asset-plant-key-evidence-in-proud-boys-case/

It’s week five of the Justice Department’s most high-profile—and high-stakes—criminal trial related to the events of January 6, 2021. Five members of the Proud Boys face the rare “seditious conspiracy” charge. Guilty verdicts—almost certain given the government’s near-perfect conviction rate for January 6 defendants—would build legal momentum for a similar indictment against Donald Trump. (The trial is so crucial that Matthew Graves, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia responsible for prosecuting every January 6 case, has shown up in the courtroom on at least three occasions.)

Trump is a major figure in this trial, an unindicted coconspirator of sorts. Last week, Judge Timothy Kelly allowed prosecutors to play a clip of Trump’s extemporaneous comment for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—a remark uttered during a presidential debate in September 2020 more than three months before the Capitol protest. The Justice Department wants to portray the comment as a call to arms, tying the alleged “militia” group to the former president.

The clip is just another thin reed of evidence in the government’s landmark domestic terrorism case. In fact, much of the “evidence” amounts to nothing more than worthless trinkets, braggadocious group chats, and otherwise protected political speech. 

It now appears that one key piece of evidence was not the work of any defendant in this case but rather written by a one-time government intelligence asset with unusual ties to both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, another group involved in January 6.

A document titled “1776 Returns” is cited by the government to indicate the group had an advanced plan to “attack” the Capitol. In two separate criminal indictments, prosecutors explained how the document ended up in the hands of Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys: “On December 30, 2020 [an unnamed] individual sent Tarrio a document—[that] set forth a plan to occupy a few ‘crucial buildings’ in Washington, D.C. on January 6, including House and Senate buildings around the Capitol, with ‘as many people as possible’ to ‘show our politicians We the People are in charge.’”

Why Israelis Have Moved to the Political Right When there’s clearly no “partner in peace.” by Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-israelis-have-moved-to-the-political-right/

Western governments and media critical of the newly elected government coalition led by Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu failed to ask themselves how it happened that the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir are now prominent ministers in Netanyahu’s government. The same critics in the west labeling Smotrich and Ben Gvir “extremists,” haven’t attached that title to Mahmoud Abbas.

Had the western critics of Israel bothered to consult history as it unfolded since the Oslo Accords of 1993, they could easily grasp the political shift that occurred in Israeli politics. In fact, the turn to the political right began in May 1977, when Menahem Begin became Israel’s first right-of-center Israeli prime minister. It was because of disillusionment with the socialist, center-left Labor party who led stagnant economies, and failed to bring the yearned-for peace. Menahem Begin, who like Smotrich and Ben Gvir was labeled an “extremist” and “terrorist” by some in the western media, made peace with Israel’s most important Arab foe – Egypt.

The Israeli public elected Itzhak Rabin in 1992. It was an endorsement of the peace platform with the Palestinians that the Labor coalition initiated. The Oslo negotiations were supposedly secret, hinted at by the Israeli media of a breakthrough and a final peaceful solution with the Palestinians. Earlier, at the 1991 Madrid conference initiated by the Bush Senior administration following the US triumph in the Gulf War, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was excluded from the negotiations that included a Syrian, Israeli, and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation comprised of Palestinian notables. Intimidated by Yasser Arafat and the PLO, little progress was made on the Israeli-Palestinian track.

Terrorism: An Ounce of Prevention? A British counter-terrorism report doesn’t mince words. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/terrorism-an-ounce-of-prevention/

In the wake of 9/11, Britain’s Home Office concocted a counter-terrorism strategy that’s known as CONTEST – an acronym (kind of) for “counter-terrorism strategy” – and that consists of four distinct programs, each of which involves collaboration among a range of government agencies as well as businesses, community groups, emergency services, and the military. Those four programs are Prevent, which seeks to keep “vulnerable people from being drawn into extremism”; Pursue, which seeks to bring terrorists to justice; Protect, which seeks to safeguard potential victims of terrorism; and Prepare, which seeks to maintain a high level of readiness. Not surprisingly, CONTEST was controversial from the start for its basis in a frank recognition that Islamic terrorism is (hello!) the work of Muslims who carry it out in the name of Islam.

Take a 2015 article for the left-wing New Statesman, in which one Maria Norris – who at the time was a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics and is now a professor (pronouns “she/her”) at Coventry University – charged that then Prime Minister David Cameron’s rhetoric about Islamic terrorism, like that of Tony Blair a decade earlier, drew unforgivably “sharp boundaries between Muslims and the west.” Moreover, complained Norris, Cameron proffered “an extremely reductionist understanding of terrorism” and “ignored the terrorists’ legitimate grievances.” Also, Cameron dared to suggest that millions of Muslims in Europe were enemies of “our way of life” and “our values.” All of which, in Norris’s estimation, resulted in “a counter-terrorism strategy that reduces the complexity and diversity of the Muslim community into a homogeneous group of potential extremists.”

Of course, Islamic terrorism isn’t about specific grievances, legitimate or otherwise. It’s jihad, plain and simple – part of a holy war on the non-Islamic world that’s been underway ever since the religion’s founding. But you can’t say such things in respectable circles in Britain, where the standard euphemism for Muslims is “Asians” and where such activities as brutal Jew-bashing by Muslim gangs are routinely whitewashed as “tensions between communities.”