The below story is the second part of a series on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s DEI newsletter, “The Dive.” You can read part one, “Biden’s Top Intelligence Agency Says Crossdressing Makes Man ‘Better Intelligence Officer,’ Internal Docs Show,” here.
An internal newsletter sent by diversity, equity, and inclusion officials in the Biden administration’s top intelligence agency warns personnel not to use “problematic phrases” when discussing Islamic terrorism and foreign adversaries such as China, an internal document obtained by The Daily Wire reveals.
The unclassified newsletter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, called “The Dive” and exclusively obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by The Daily Wire, argues in its cover story that the intelligence community needs to focus on “changing terminology related to counterterrorism,” because “words matter.”
“This article is about one of our goals: disentangling Islam from words and phrases used to discuss terrorism and extremist violence,” writes the author of the article, whose name was redacted from the document released to The Daily Wire. The article declares that it’s trying to remove “certain phrases to identify international terrorism threats that are hurtful to Muslim-Americans.”
“Some of the problematic phrases include, but are not limited to: ‘Salafi-Jihadist,’ ‘Jihadist,’ ‘Islamic-Extremist,’ ‘Sunni/Shia-Extremism,’ and ‘Radical Islamists.’”
The article is part of the newsletter created by ODNI’s Intelligence Community Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Office and sent out to personnel throughout the Intelligence Community, which includes the country’s most powerful executive agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as intelligence components within each branch of the military.
Among the other articles featured in the newsletter was the personal testimony of a man who enjoys dressing like a woman and says that crossdressing and his gender identity make him a better intelligence officer.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and U.S. Army veteran who fought in Afghanistan, said the newsletter is another example of misplaced priorities by the Biden administration.
“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, said the guidance in the newsletter is “totally insane.”
“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 said. “The same people are now running the Biden Administration, so it is no surprise they are making the same mistakes.”
The newsletter was published just months after Islamic Hamas terrorists murdered roughly 1,200 Israelis during the October 7th terrorist attack. Meanwhile, the United States has experienced three consecutive year-over-year increases in border encounters with those on the terror watch list amid an unprecedented border crisis that’s resulted in about 9 million nationwide encounters and 1.7 million estimated gotaways since Biden took office.
The newsletter states that the DEI office took guidance from the Muslim community when considering alternative terms.
“We took great efforts to engage with the Muslim community, academics, and members of our constituency across the country,” it reads. “In July 2023, we invited a renowned Islamic scholar, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf of Zaytuna College, to speak.”
It went on to pull from Islamic history to provide intelligence personnel with an alternate term to use to describe Islamic terrorists. “The term Khawarij means ‘outsiders’ and references a group of individuals in Islamic history who rebelled against Ali ibn Abi Talib — one of the rightly guided caliphs after the Prophet Muhammad’s passing,” it says.
The article concludes that these word choices “have a direct impact on everything we do in our daily life, including our work.”
“We ask that employees spread awareness about the concern of the terminology we are seeing and utilize the substitute terms recommended to ensure we are inclusive, accurate, and sensitive,” it says.
But the ODNI newsletter didn’t stop at identifying “problematic phrases” pertaining to Islamic terrorism, in fact, the entire edition focused on purging “biased” terminology from the communications of the intelligence community.
Another portion of the newsletter went on to condemn the use of everyday terms like “cakewalk” and “blacklist,” accusing the words of being loaded with bias. Instead of saying “I’ve been blacklisted from this event,” for example, the ODNI newsletter tells personnel to say “I’ve been banned,” arguing that “blacklisted implies black is bad and white is good.” It claims that “cakewalk” should also be avoided because it allegedly “refers to a dance performed by slaves for slave owners on plantation grounds.”
The newsletter opens with a letter from the Editor-in-Chief of The Dive, whose name is also redacted from the document, outlining some of the efforts that have been made to make the IC’s language more inclusive.
“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,” one example reads. “This edition also has articles that speak to inclusivity more broadly, exploring gender identity, advances in accessibility, and diversity in leadership,” it explains, an apparent reference to the article later in the newsletter claiming that crossdressing makes him a “better intelligence officer.”
There’s also a DEI-themed word search with the terms “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “ally,” among others.
“We seek to engage with officers across the IC, enlighten readers about advancements in DEIA, and empower every employee to speak their truth,” the end of the newsletter reads.
A spokesman for ODNI confirmed that the newsletter was sent out to every element of the Intelligence Community.
“The IC Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (IC DEIA) Office manages the IC’s efforts to build a diverse and inclusive workforce, and as part of their work, they distribute The Dive, a quarterly magazine, to each IC element’s DEIA office and/or Equal Employment Opportunity office,” the spokesman told The Daily Wire.
The ODNI newsletter is only the latest example of the United States Intelligence Community advancing far-left ideologies. 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.”
Other federal agencies have poured millions of taxpayer funds into DEI initiatives, with the Pentagon spending as much as $270 million under Biden to advance the leftwing agenda. There’s also the State Department, which the Daily Wire revealed had spent over $77 million over two years under Biden on DEI programs, with hundreds of millions more in requests for DEI-related initiatives.
Documents obtained by The Daily Wire have also revealed that top Pentagon officials were concerning themselves with a climate initiative when they failed to get troops safely out of Afghanistan in August 2021, where 13 Americans were killed in a terrorist attack.
The newsletter’s guidance to drop certain terms that have been deemed offensive bears similarities to an attempt from the Rand Corporation, a federal contractor, to urge DHS to adopt “inclusive language” by dropping terms like “jihadist,” “looter,” and “illegal immigrant.”
Far-left beliefs on race and gender have been embedded within both the intelligence community and the wider federal government in large part due 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.”
You can read the entire edition of “The Dive,” titled “Words Matter: The Importance of Words,” here:
FULL DOCUMENT: Read The Full DEI Newsletter From The Biden Administration’s Top Intel Agency by Daily Wire Investigations Team on Scribd