Tulsi Gabbard On Removing DEI Initiatives To Protect National Security

These jobs are called public service for a reason. But over time, so much as we've seen, especially as we've seen over the last four years leading up to this moment, leading up to the events that you'll see in this film, we see motives that are not at all about serving the public or serving the American people. Motives are for power or for political influence or for radical change that not only has nothing to do with the Constitution, it's actually undermining the Constitution, undermining the interests of the American people and our safety, security, and freedom. One of the things that I have sought to address and continue to address as we came in and the President put out his executive order to strip all of the DEI policies from across the U.S. government, you know, a lot of the critics say, okay, DEI, and we still get it from some of the Democrats in Congress about, you know, well, it's racism or it's sexism or it's exclusion, it's discrimination, all of these words that they attach to and what they use to promote DEI. But in the field that I'm working in, the national security space, as Matt experienced in his former life, is the propagation of these DEI policies directly undermine our national security. I'll give a couple of brief examples within the intelligence community. In my organization, my predecessor made it a huge priority to make sure that DEI was implemented every single day, certainly across the Office of Director of National Intelligence, but across the intelligence community. People's performance reviews were measured by how much time did you dedicate towards DEI initiatives at every level. So if you hope to get promoted, if you hope to be competitive in a job that you were seeking, I heard from some folks who are careerists in the workforce saying that they had to dedicate 50% of their day, 50% of their time towards promoting DEI initiatives. I don't even know how you could spend that much time, but these are the things that their success or failure were measured against. Not how many terrorists did you find. Not how good was your intelligence analysis. It was how much time were you spending pushing DEI initiatives. And we saw people in the intelligence community who embraced that wholeheartedly. Others were forced into compliance, but we saw people who embraced it wholeheartedly to the point where they're saying, hey, look, you can't have people who happen to be Caucasian intelligence analysts going and doing work in places like the continent of Africa because their white privilege will taint their bias. So they cannot be objective intelligence analysts. Insanity. And how disrespectful to those professional analysts who've dedicated their life to this craft. In other cases, we had people reporting examples of intelligence professionals driving in to work every day, parking their truck in the parking garage and being reported for extremism because they had don't tread on me stickers on their truck. And people feeling attacked because they had to see this as they parked their car and walked by the truck. We're talking about people and organizations who've been charged with securing our country. And you see how in these kinds of examples and the examples that you'll see through Matt's eyes, how these policies undermine the interests of the American people and the courage that it requires to take a stand and say, no, this is wrong. Unfortunately, too many people, as we've seen, are intimidated to cower in fear and in silence. We've seen many, many, many examples of this. And what happens, what are the consequences? What are the repercussions? Why do they cower in fear? Because they see what happens to people like Matt and his family when they have the courage to stand up and say, no, this is wrong. The oath that I took when I put this uniform on actually means something. It means taking a stand for what is right. It means swearing to uphold that constitution, defending it against enemies foreign and domestic. It means that whether you wear the uniform or not, this is the responsibility and privilege that we carry as Americans. Not just when it's easy, not just when everybody agrees with you, not just when you can hang out with your friends, be like, hey, guys, we're doing a great job. We're fighting the good fight. No, it means stepping into the arena. You talked about Charlie Kirk. You talk about Donald Trump. You talk about these different examples of people who step into the arena, not because they're shoved, but willingly and happily taking on this fight for what is right, for what is true, for what is just. And representing that integrity and that courage that our founding fathers themselves embodied and what they hoped that we, as Americans, would take on for ourselves, knowing that our freedom in this country will only exist so long as we have the will to stand up and defend it.