The DEI Secret Service

“The strength of our organization,” Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle argued in the 2023 report, lay in, among other things, “seeking out the boundless benefits of diversity.”

The Secret Service offers “leadership training on how best to support LGBTQ+ employees” and “training on unconscious bias” which is the idea that all white people are innately racist, and tries to guide more “more inclusive decisions” while “increasing empathy” for minorities.

Special Agents in Charge are tasked with DEI which distracts from their core duties, but diversity and its boundless benefits was not why the Secret Service existed. The Left was.

“Anarchy is a crime against the whole human race; and all mankind should band against the anarchist,” President Theodore Roosevelt had warned in his annual message to Congress.

Several months earlier, a leftist anarchist had murdered President McKinley. Roosevelt, always a man of action, headed out by boat, train and wagon, to the scene, took the oath of office in borrowed clothes and launched a war against the Left.

“When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance,” he declared while urging Congress to ban leftist literature from the mails.

He wanted to give the federal government the authority to suppress the leftist radicals by signing treaties with other nations to outlaw anarchy “like piracy and that form of man-stealing known as the slave trade; for it is of far blacker infamy than either.”

While these efforts failed, Congress did approve the expansion of the Secret Service to protect the president. And Theodore Roosevelt became the first president to be formally protected. (Roosevelt was shot later by an assassin at a campaign event in Milwaukee, but continued his speech. The bullet remained embedded in the muscle tissue of his chest for the rest of his life.)

The track record for preventing leftist presidential assassinations was mixed. After the radical terrorists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Massachusetts, a plot by anarchists to bomb President Herbert Hoover’s rail car in Argentina was averted locally. The Secret Service successfully stopped a Puerto Rican nationalist terror attack against President Harry Truman, but failed to prevent a Communist from murdering President John F. Kennedy.

And it once again failed to stop President Donald J. Trump’s assassin until he had taken his shot. The nation’s first true federal law enforcement agency had been designated to protect presidents in response to a wave of radical leftist terror. Earlier proposals to retask the Secret Service, including after the assassination of President Lincoln, who had created it to stop counterfeiting, to protect presidents had been turned down until the anarchist reign of terror.

Unfortunately the Secret Service, like much of federal law enforcement, drifted from its original mission. Rather than fighting leftist radicalism, the Secret Service embraced it.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, formerly of Biden’s protective detail, and boosted by Jill Biden to serve as director, made it her mission to remake the organization into a 30% female force and to pursue DEI. “I am very conscious as I sit in this chair now that we need to attract diverse candidates,” she told CBS News.

While the Secret Service may not work so well at stopping assassins, it has an ‘Equity’ team that works “diligently to address the needs of the agency’s diverse workforce” through “caring support, informative training sessions” and “cultural awareness events”.

Two of the three top executive roles in the Secret Service were held by women, by Cheatle and Chief Operating Officer Cynthia Sjoberg Radway who was brought in to find new recruits.

Beyond 30% female recruits, the Secret Service was committed to a 12% disabled workforce, hiring without regard to” disability (physical or mental)” or “gender identity” which is very promising for mentally ill transgender recruits, but not those whom they are supposed to protect.

And it holds an annual “Unity Day” to “pay homage to the unique accomplishments that various ethnic groups, cultures and individuals with disabilities have made to our organization.”

“Embracing a diverse and inclusive workforce enables the Secret Service to be more responsive and better prepared to address the evolving security threats facing our nation’s leaders,” the Secret Service claims, without clarifying exactly how using diversity rather than ability saves lives. Was Trump better protected because the Secret Service has a more “diverse” workforce?

The Secret Service claims that it only hires 1 out of 250 Special Agent applicants and DEI ensures that many of those will be hired for affirmative action reasons rather than merit.

The Secret Service career page images of its ideal recruits features three women, two of them minorities, and one minority man; a promotional recruitment video centers on a black woman with no white men in sight. The same tends to be true across Secret Service literature where I had to flip through endless pages of ideal diverse agents in search of one single white man. But the pictures of white men usually only appeared in the photographs of actual training exercises.

“I’m a black female and that’s not what people imagine when they think of a Secret Service Agent,” a pull quote from the protective assignments section gushes.

An organization once tasked with fighting leftist assassins is now instead focused on “positive organizational change where fairness, equality, diversity and inclusion are put into practice by all Secret Service employees.” And perhaps not stopping Trump’s assassin was one example.

DEI is a fundamentally ideological program and beyond lowering the effectiveness of any organization, it also introduces radical political agendas into the body of the group. Did those biases play any role in the failures of the Secret Service during the assassination attempt?

It’s difficult to know, but the only way to be sure is by weeding politics out of the Secret Service.

President Theodore Roosevelt turned to the Secret Service to protect presidents from the Left. But if the Secret Service and other federal law enforcement agencies are infiltrated by the Left, who will protect Republican and conservative public officials from their radical ‘protectors’.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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