On October 28 at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, while introducing a premier showing of the new documentary, “Call Sign Courage: The Matt Lohmeier Story“, Director National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard talked about the outrageous CRT/DEI indoctrination that took place in the Intelligence Community.
Watch:
TRANSCRIPT
Thank you to the Heritage Foundation both for hosting, really for supporting the production of this film and telling Matt’s story. I’m looking forward to seeing it. Matt and I’ve gotten to know each other through this post-November 5th period.
But just before we came up here, we were downstairs and Matt said, you know, this film isn’t really about me. It is a story about a love of country, love of God. All the things your wife wanted you to say right now. Your integrity, courage and putting service above self.
Matt was saying, you know, it’s really hard to watch yourself on TV, which I understand. But his humility allows for this story to be told in a deeply impactful way, because you can read articles in a newspaper or online, or you can hear reporters talking about something. But the real impact of what Matt and his family went through can only be felt when people hear him and see his story for themselves.
The power of storytelling is what has the power to shape policy and bring about real and lasting change. And that, for me, is when we look at all of these public institutions, you look at the vision that our founders had for our country, a government of, by and for the people.
You look at the expectations that the American people should have of our public institutions, that these institutions and the people who get up and go and work there every day, should wake up with the motivation and inspiration of service.
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 and 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 and security and freedom.
One of the things that I have sought to address and continue to address as we came in, the President put out an Executive Order to strip out all of the DEI policies from across the US government.
A lot of the critics say okay, DEI–we still get it from some of the Democrats in Congress–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 of brief examples within the Intelligence Community and my organization.
My predecessor made it a huge priority to make sure that DEI was implemented every single day, certainly across the Director of National Intelligence, but all 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 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 on it.
These are the things that their success or failure were measured against. Not how many terrorists did you find? Not not how good was your intelligence analysis? It was how much time are 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 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 in organizations who’ve been charged with securing our country.
You see how 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 and be like, hey guys, we’re doing a great job. We’re fighting the good fight.
No, it means stepping into the arena.
You talk 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 as long as we have the will to stand up and defend it.
So while I haven’t yet seen the movie, I know Matt well enough to know and understand, the impact and the inspiration that those who view this movie will see and why stories like this are so important to be told.
The circumstances around the battles for freedom and liberty can shift and change.
The challenge will constantly be upon us to be the ones who choose ourselves to step into the arena and not think that it’s going to be somebody else’s fight.
This is how we defend our nation. This is how we uphold our Constitution, and this is how we ensure that this country that we love remains free for the next generation and generations to come.
Thank you all for being here. And thank you for the support for those who made this film and for Matt, his family. Thank you.