Ted Cruz Blasts Biden Intel Office Over Diversity Newsletter: ‘Worse Than Silly. It’s Dangerous’

 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) blasted the Biden administration’s top intelligence office in response to a diversity newsletter it sent out instructed intelligence agents to avoid using “problematic language” when discussing Islamic terrorism and celebrating crossdressing in its ranks.

““On one level you say, ‘okay, this sort of language political correctness stuff, it’s silly’. But in this instance, it’s much worse than silly. It is dangerous,” Cruz said on his podcast, referencing a Daily Wire investigation that revealed the contents of an official Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) diversity newsletter called “The Dive.”

The newsletter was sent to the NSA, FBI, CIA, and components within each branch of the military and it specifically stated that the terms “Jihadist” and “radical Islam” should be avoided because of their “hurtful” nature.

 

Cruz warned that the ODNI’s insistence on using sensitive language when discussing counter terrorism threatens to endanger Americans.

“If the intelligence community … refuses to acknowledge what is actually happening, it means they will be utterly ineffective in fighting against it and keeping Americans and our allies safe.”

The intelligence community’s embrace of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda under the Biden administration comes as the Democrat president has worked to institutionalize the leftwing dogma throughout all agencies within the executive branch.

Cruz went on to point out that the ODNI document marks a continuation of an Obama era effort to advance political correctness even when it undermines our national security.

“This is continuing the path of putting politics above national security that we saw when Barack Obama was president,” Sen. Cruz contended. “When Barack Obama was president, I actually chaired a hearing that examined the purge, that the Obama White House insisted DHS to remove from their records any reference to radical Islamic terrorism, or Islam, or Muslim, or jihadist.”

“October 7 was carried out by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” Cruz reminded before adding “Apparently, that is an inconvenient fact to the language, commissars, who I presume want to edit out the word Islamic from the name of the terrorist group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

While much of the document focused on avoiding “problematic phrases” when discussing Islamic terrorism, it also sought to police language used by intelligence agents more broadly. The newsletter’s theme was “words matter,” and the opening article boasted that “IC employee resource groups advocating for Asian and Pacific Islander heritage have been particularly successful in creating a new framework and language guidelines for how we talk about the People’s Republic of China.”

The same ODNI document also featured an article from an anonymous intelligence agent who claimed that crossdressing makes him a “better intelligence officer,” citing his newfound ability to relate to women and his capacity as an ally for “LGBTQIA+” individuals. 

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and U.S. Army veteran who fought in Afghanistan, also condemned the newsletter and warned that the prioritization of DEI could have serious national security consequences. “

The Biden administration putting DEI above national security concerns is a tragedy waiting to happen,” Cotton told The Daily Wire after reviewing the newsletter. “Our intelligence agencies should spend their time finding terrorists, not worrying about whether they will offend them.”

Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and U.S. Army veteran who fought in the elite Green Berets, also called out the ODNI document as a return to Obama-era directives. “It is a return to the same Obama Administration head-in-the-sand approach to Islamic extremism that led to Obama calling ISIS the JV team,” Waltz argued. “The same people are now running the Biden Administration, so it is no surprise they are making the same mistakes.”

The ODNI is not the only facet of the intelligence community that’s pushed far-left dogmas on race and gender in the name of DEI. The National Security Agency (NSA) published an internal DEI glossary, exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire, that included terms like “white fragility,” “transmisogyny,” “settler colonialism,” and even the gender neutral pronouns of “ze” and “zir.”

The DEI agenda has spread throughout the federal government largely thanks to executive orders from Biden that sought to institutionalize extreme ideologies into the operations of the federal bureaucracy. Former President Donald Trump has signaled that he may gut the federal bureaucracy through an executive order called Schedule F, which would remove civil services protections from thousands of bureaucrats who threaten to undermine his agenda.

Others are preparing to fill in the gap left by outgoing officials, assembling a personnel database of those who might serve in the next administration through the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, an initiative from the Heritage Foundation that seeks to “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”