John A. Gentry

It was political.

Okay, fair enough.

People could agree or disagree on that.

In the roughly 2012-13 period, people began to say, you know, these preferences are causing operational problems.

You're hiring favored demographic groups but not qualified white men, and it's causing demographic problems.

So these are mainly accusations.

But about that same time, so call it 2013, call it roughly the beginning of Obama's second term, Jim Clapper of the DNI mainly, but then also Brennan to some degree too, began to add another claim.

And that claim was that DEI policies improve the operational performance of the intelligence community.

So I've been in the, you know, as you introduced me earlier on, been in the academic world and studying intelligence and teaching on it and so on.

So I kind of scratched my head and said, gee, if this is the case, then where's the evidence?

Let me see some evidence.

So I began to look at this and uncharacteristically for the intelligence business, where, as you know,

Assertions, assessments are supposed to be backed by evidence, right?

Well, there wasn't any.

So I wrote eventually a paper that was published in December of 2021 that said, I cannot find any evidence to support that claim.

that claim that DEI improves the performance.

So my project here was to assess the claim as opposed to looking at the bigger picture of whether DEI affects performance in any other ways.

Okay, so I got a lot of reaction from this.

So the DEI proponents, of course, didn't like it.

It was not politically correct.