DEI Diplomat “Superheroes” No One Asked For

Americans love superheroes, so we shouldn’t be surprised that an informal team within the Biden administration State Department reportedly called itself the “Avengers,” in a nod to the Marvel Comics franchise.

Among them, a source told me, were Desiree Cormier Smith, special representative for racial equity and justice; Jessica Stern, special envoy to advance the human rights of LGBTQ people; and Kelly M. Fay Rodriguez, special representative for international labor repairs.

Instead of crime, this crack team of political appointees fought global injustice, cis-heteronormativity, and the patriarchy from their secret lair in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Each earned close to $200,000 annually.

Now that they are the away team, it seems like a good time to ask what the “Avengers” achieved while they were flying around the world on missions of supposed national importance.

In 2022, Ms. Rodriguez gave an award “for Excellence in Labor Diplomacy” to a staffer at the U.S. Embassy in South Africa. In 2023, she spoke at a Forced Labor Technical Expo. In 2024, she spoke at a conference in Belfast “on how collective bargaining can transform economies and outcomes.” That’s pretty much all Google gave me. Mission accomplished?

Ms. Stern traveled from Hungary to Nepal to Peru as President Biden’s rainbow envoy, making sure to have professional photographs taken, though she was reportedly tardy in turning in her travel vouchers. What she achieved is hard to quantify. She reportedly pressured U.S. ambassadors to raise the Progress Pride flag, even in conservative countries where it did more harm than good to U.S. foreign policy goals. So there’s that.

Ms. Cormier Smith had quit the Foreign Service after two overseas tours to work for the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations. Under President Obama, she came back as a political appointee. Under Mr. Biden, she was named a special envoy, billed as “a recognized racial justice expert with a deep and steadfast commitment to equity and justice for all.”

Recognized for what? Ms. Cormier Smith has written no books or notable articles that I can find. She did do a podcast episode in 2020 titled “Trump’s White Supremacist Foreign Policy,” so maybe that’s it.

In her final official X account posts, Ms. Cormier Smith said she retired “with immense pride in what we have accomplished together.” What Ms. Cormier Smith did was all within the job description of every U.S. ambassador, so it’s hard to see what value this “racial justice expert” added.

In a video, she claims that artificial intelligence “offers incredible potential to advance equity by increasing access to health care, education, and economic opportunity.” Still, she warns that “too often, marginalized populations bear the worst harms of AI.” How is that? She gives no specifics.

How can you fight injustice if you can’t identify or quantify it? Maybe that’s the point. Without a definition of the problem or ways to measure success, the struggle against injustice—and the jobs, titles, and money that come with it—goes on forever.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times recently, Ms. Cormier Smith, Ms. Rodriguez, and Beth Van Schaack, another Biden-appointed ambassador, accuse Secretary of State Marco Rubio of “overseeing the near-total destruction of his department’s human rights and global justice policy shops and programs.” What he is really doing is destroying their cozy web of jobs.

They believe it is “racist” for the department to celebrate our “shared Western civilizational heritage with Europe” and that it is wrong to say human rights derive from Western values. Really? Where do they come from, then?

They claim that “the flagship human rights instrument is the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” That document was written by eight men of European descent, Eleanor Roosevelt, and a Chinese sage, whose biggest contribution was to remove all references to God. It was based on 2,000 years of Western philosophical and political progress.

None of these women is going to starve. All three bounced from their political jobs and landed nice gigs as U.S. foreign policy fellows at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard University. According to legal legend Alan Dershowitz, “Carr Center has become a sewer for antisemitism.” So best of luck to Ms. Stern there.

The three ladies’ project descriptions at Harvard sound awfully close to their old government jobs. It’s no coincidence that Harvard created the fellowship the year President Trump took office, so these “distinguished leaders” get a paycheck until they can reboard the government gravy train.

Mr. Rubio is reorganizing his department to better achieve America’s foreign policy and to more wisely spend our tax dollars. He eliminated Ms. Cormier Smith’s old job, the special representative for racial equity and justice, a duplicative boondoggle created by Mr. Biden.

It’s time to shrink the circular, self-feeding complex of academia, foreign policy, and nongovernmental organizations and get back to promoting our essential national interests abroad. Mr. Rubio’s reforms are a good start.

Simon Hankinson is a Senior Research Fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.

Reprinted with permission from Heritage.org by Simon Hankinson.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.