By Chuck Warren
Last week, Nejwa Ali, an officer at the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services was fired after it turned out that she was previously a spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization. After Israel’s response to the attack by Hamas, Ali posted a series of anti-Israel messages, including, “F**k Israel.”
Another official, Josh Paul, resigned last week in protest of the administration’s Israel policy. Paul was a Department of State official tasked with arms transfers. In this capacity, he hadn’t been bothered by all the arms transfers the U.S. government authorized to partners with less than optimal human rights records, but it was the support for a democratic ally that upset his stomach.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken also held a “listening session” to better understand how his department’s employees were upset by the support for Israel.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary and an election denier, when asked about the rise of attacks of Jews in America, responded by condemning anti-Muslim bigotry, not saying a word about Jews.
This is a problem not limited to this war. The most infamous case is that of Sam Brinton, a nonbinary man who was a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy. Brinton was an LGBT activist who also turned out to have been stealing people’s bags at airports.
The administration is full of people who, even if they have the proper resume for their jobs—and often they don’t— lack the proper character. Rather, they are hired for their woke credentials and merits for progressive activism. Many of them are hired by the administration as civil servants, not political appointees, which makes it nearly impossible for future Republican administrations to fire. Others, like Paul and Ali, are already there but receive promotions for their merits.
Sadly, it’s normal to expect a deep progressive bent in federal civil service. It is unfortunate that this is true, and it is even worse that these progressives get promotions.
Especially with civil servants, the promise when established was that these servants would be out of partisan politics and administrators following orders. When Republicans complained that this wasn’t true, Democrats and their partisans in the press dismissed these concerns that Republicans just hate the government. When the reports would come out about how these civil service officers would try to create obstacles for the lawful and legitimate political directives during the administration of Donald Trump, everybody celebrated the “resistance.” Now, Democrats are getting a taste of their own medicine. Joe Biden, who boasted about his “very progressive” record when he ran for president, is not progressive enough for these wokesters, even though he hired and promoted all of them.
Government is serious business. As any Israeli or Ukrainian would tell you, it’s literally a matter of life and death, of war and peace. But when you fill it with people whose only credential is dedication to the crude ideology of wokeism, not people with technical expertise of the issues they work on, what you get in return is incompetence, death, and Hamas sympathy.
When the wokes at the Department of State rebelled against the U.S. policy toward Israel, instead of holding a listening session, the secretary should have fired them all. By being sympathetic, he didn’t boost the morale of his staff—does anyone think that there is any reasoning with the terrorist sympathizers we have been witnessing in our streets and on our campuses?—but he conveyed the message that he is a weak executive who can be manipulated by his subordinates, and that those subordinates can get away with insubordination. He was being tested, and he failed the test. He showed that, as long as you don’t post on Instagram endorsing a Jewish pogrom, you won’t lose your job.
Wokesters are like a monster, Democrats fed it, first to be their pet, and now that the monster has grown up it will eat them last. They have hired them because, for Democrats, there are no enemies to the left. Until Hamas decided to start a genocidal war against Jews. Now, Democrats are finding themselves in a bind, caught between supporting Israel and feeding the monster.
When Mitt Romney ran in 2012, he was mocked for his “binder full of women” comment. He had gone out of his way to have a list of highly competent and qualified women to be hired. But Democrats and their allies in the press attacked him for religious bigotry and because they wanted to defeat him. But also, they didn’t like his binder full of women. It didn’t matter if Romney had promised to only hire ethnic minorities, women, and LGBT people. Democrats talk the good game about diversity. But they actually care about homogeneity. They like a unified list of ideologues who advance ultra-progressive causes, regardless of qualification and competence, and Romney was not going to hire any of them. And they supported Biden because they knew that he would, and he did. Damned are we with the consequences.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.