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So earlier this week Biden nominated Avril Haines for Director of National Intelligence. Here's why it's important to pay attention to this: 1/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/us/politics/biden-haines-national-intelligence.html
Some news stories emphasize that Haines would be the first woman in this role. 2/ https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/11/23/938132034/avril-haines-nominated-as-first-female-director-of-national-intelligence
This turns her nomination into a sign of progress in the fight for gender equality in the workplace and Biden into an agent of progress. But what we have here is something Inderpal Grewal calls "security feminism." 3/
As Grewal writes, security feminism maintains "a notion of female empowerment as an important state and imperial project, one justifying US military intervention." The security feminist "appears as a liberal, white, and patriotic feminist working for the state and military." 4/
The Trump Admin was a big advocate of security feminism. In 2017, the Women, Peace, and Security Act was signed into law. One of its goals? To "promote the meaningful inclusion of women" in depts like the DoD and the DHS. 5/ https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1141
If your feminism is anti-imperial and antiwar you should take a closer look at Haines's record. While working for the Obama administration, Haines was instrumental in developing the US drone program's policy on targeted killing. 6/ https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/targeted-killing
We should also note that the position Haines is nominated for is the Director of National Intelligence. It turns out that this is a relatively new post, born out of the US-led War on Terror. Like ICE, it comes about in direct response to 9/11. 7/ https://www.dni.gov/index.php/who-we-are/history
Even after she leaves the WH she goes to consult at Palantir, a company that infamously provides tech support for ICE. This info was scrubbed from her resume when she started working with Biden again 
One incredible footnotes to all this is that Haines once owned an indy bookstore in Baltimore that supported small presses. 9/
Obama was known as the Reader-In-Chief but reading doesn't magically give people good politics. We know this. Anyway, read @namwalien's "The Banality of Empathy" and protest Biden's nomination. end/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/
