Just two people can stop woke.
FOIA documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reveal that back in 2020, the folks in their Corporate Communications office for some reason had the bright idea of inviting the highly partisan woke head of “Global Activism Strategy” at the ultra-left Ben & Jerry’s company located in the People’s Republic of Vermont.
This is a company that thinks capitalism is a bad idea and actively pushes progressive Leftist ideology. You name a woke stance, and Ben & Jerry’s supports it. Just about everyone and their grandmother knows this.
And yet somehow in the DIA Corporate Communications office, “Ben & Jerry’s and Mr. Miller’s alleged partisan stance was not identified during the vetting process,” according to a DIA Inspector General memo. We’re either talking about DIA employees who are either astonishingly uninformed and couldn’t bother to look up a website and a Twitter feed, or some HR types indoctrinated from college think Ben & Jerry’s political stance is normal and what everyone thinks.
The plan was to have all DIA employees watch a pre-recorded video by this activist talking about social justice issues, and then have him speak as part of DIA’s MasterMinds/Distinguished Speakers program.
Two separate complaints about DIA hosting a speaker and topic like this were received at the IG’s office, who wrote on 17 Sept 2020:
“The first Complainant stated that by hosting the event, DIA could be seen as endorsing and taking a partisan stance with Ben & Jerry’s, and that Ben & Jerry’s has made arguments via open source that the Complainant believes reflects Ben & Jerry’s does not support law enforcement and supports a notion of rampant white supremacy in the U.S.
The second Complainant stated that Mr. Miller is a political activist; as a DoD organization and part of the U.S. Government, DIA should not have him as a speaker or pay him with tax payer money.
We received the complaints in response to the DIA Office of Corporate Communications (OCC) email sent to the DIA workforce on September 3, 2020, announcing that DIA was hosting Mr. Miller on September 9, 2020.
According to OCC, the special session was a continuation of Mr. Miller’s pre-recorded MasterMinds video wherein he would discuss the history and foundation of Ben & Jerry’s roles in social justice issues and address the company’s current involvement and initiative in combating inequality and pressing social issues.
All DIA employees were encouraged to watch the recording prior to attending the live MicroSoft Teams event. Both Complainants believed that this event violated the Hatch Act.”
The IG found first that the 9 September event had been postponed by the Corporate Communications office because evidently right after the event was announced on 3 September, enough people raised concerns with them about the partisan stance of the company and speaker and the office realized they had not “properly vetted” them.
The IG said there were concerns that DIA was supporting partisan stance or political activism and they directed the Communications office to review their procedures for vetting outside organizations and speakers and ensure that control are in place “to avoid the appearance of bias by the Agency.” The rest of the FOIA’d memos are about their revised vetting procedures.
The moral of the story: SPEAK UP when you see your organization pushing a biased, anti-American left-wing ideology.
The man that did the FOIA reached out to this speaker and in an interview, the speaker said he initially thought the invite to speak at DIA was a joke. He was later told by a DIA employee that his speech was canceled due to a vague technical Zoom issue, but his reaction “was one of not being overly surprised.” So even he wondered why in the world would the Defense Intelligence Agency bring in a speaker like him.
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