The CIA's New 'Diversity' Ad Is Deeply Ridiculous And So Is Ted Cruz
What Would Jason Bourne Do? WWJBD?
You can believe two things at once. Even things that might at first seem contradictory.
For instance, I can believe that Donald Trump is a conman and a liar. I can also believe that woke activists, much of the TRA movement and antifa are largely full of shit. I can despise Trump without adoring Biden. I can love America and loathe our foreign policy. I can be in favor of free markets and free healthcare. I can be anti-statist and and anti-capitalist. I can hate the modern world with its endless roads and pollution and industrialized misery, and enjoy the creature comforts it provides. I can wail about the evils of social media . . . on Twitter.
Within us are multitudes. It’s possible to be on the left without waxing on about “intersectionality” or dunking on people on Twitter by calling them “cishet” as though that word means anything to 95% of the population.
I’m often dismissed out of hand as parroting “rightwing” talking points but I find most rightwing politics distasteful and wrongheaded at best and downright vile at the extremes. Oddly, most of the criticism I receive over my critique of the left is when I point out the new woke left’s authoritarian tendencies—tendencies I believe are shared with the far right (though with an emphasis on different issues, of course).
In any case, this brings us to one Ted Cruz, Junior Senator of Texas, red-blooded GOP firebrand and “Lucifer in the flesh” according to Former House Speaker John Boehner who also said “I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” I’ve always sort of admired Boehner for saying this, even if it was after his political career had rounded its final bend.
It certainly seems like a fair assessment of Mr. Cruz who totally stole my idea to sell self-autographed copies of Dr. Seuss books. What a dick.
Anyways, here is a tweet from Mr. Cruz that is currently being mocked far and wide on left-Twitter (and probably by some of his pals in the GOP):
Quoth the woman in the CIA ad:
“I used to suffer from imposter syndrome, but at 36 I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I’m tired of feeling like I’m supposed to apologize for the space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance. I am proud of me, full stop.”
You go girl. Intoxicate me with your brilliance.
What we really need is a more diverse CIA to help instigate coups in Latin America and the Middle East. Stop apologizing for the abstract space you occupy and start helping the American empire occupy actual spaces in third world countries across the globe!
And honestly, what better way to fight back against the patriarchy than to join the patriarchy and help the American military undermine our enemies and disrupt fledgling democracies we see as potential threats?
#wakeup #feminism #girlpower
A couple things to note here.
First, Ted Cruz is quote-tweeting Aisha Ahmad, a leftist academic who attended Harvard Law and is now a PhD candidate at Oxford. He is not quote-tweeting some frothing-at-the-mouth rightwinger. This is important to note because I want to keep emphasizing the fact that many on the left, including intellectuals, are fed up with this bullshit.
Here’s another one of Ahmad’s tweets just to illustrate my point:
I yearn for the same thing! It’s almost as if the grand project of the left ought to be about workers rights and human dignity and freedom from tyranny and not a bizarre, alienating and highly-policed vocabulary that uses words that nobody understands like “intersectionality” and “cisgender millennial” and that viciously casts out anyone who doesn’t get hip to the lingo or who made some bad joke when they were 14.
I mean, do people on the left actually consider this recruiting advertisement1 a win?
The CIA under Biden wants to recruit more diverse employees (which, by the way, is probably strategically savvy since they want to be able to spy and meddle in as diverse array of countries as possible) but posting an ad that utilizes the language of wokedom is not the same thing as making any sort of structural change to American foreign policy, or even gender equality. Do we really think that hiring proud cisgender millennial Latinas (um, I think you mean LatniXs) who want to “intoxicate people” with their brilliance is going to stop the drone strikes and the death squads?
This is why the woke movement is so vapid. Their victories are all rooted in laughably simplistic identity politics. We shouldn’t even use the word “victory” when nothing tangible is actually achieved beyond a ridiculous, cringe-worthy ad trying to appeal to woke college graduates who I guess wan to join up and pursue our deeply awful foreign policy? Cool, bro. Cool.
Oh yeah, but let’s talk about how Ted Cruz invokes the obviously fictional character of Jason Bourne. Yeah, that’s what’s important here, clearly.
(By the way, I really did enjoy The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum2. It’s actually one of my favorite spy thrillers ever, and you should absolutely read it when you get a chance. In fact, I might have to re-read it. Maybe it could be our first book club unless someone has a better idea? Maybe we should do something more serious? Let me know in the comments!)
Of course, I’m pretty sure that even Ted Cruz knows that Jason Bourne is a fictional character and I’m not sure why he used that to illustrate his point since it would so easily open him to criticism. I guess once the Marines release their own absurdist woke recruitment ad he can say “We’ve come a long ways since Jack Reacher!” and we’ll do this little song and dance again.
Here’s the thing, my droogies: we can believe two things at once. We can believe that Ted Cruz is a “miserable bastard” and also that this deeply silly CIA ad is not only a grotesque mockery of all the things it purportedly is promoting, but also a pretty solid example of how completely pointless wokeness has become ever since it was appropriated from its original meaning and used to colonize universities and the media and now even the marketing department for the Central Goddamn Intelligence Agency.
Good lord what fools these mortals be.
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Cruz’s other silly mistake here is framing the ad as though it’s meant to put the fear of God into our enemies. It isn’t. It’s a recruiting ad aimed at Americans. Recruiting ads are typically not trying to scare China or Russia, they’re trying to get the right people hired. That’s why ads for the Marines always make serving in the Marines look so badass to teenage boys.
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