Tulsi Gabbard details the dangerous power D.C. bureaucrats hold

Woodrow Wilson’s progressive movement firmly believed that if you put bureaucrats in charge, a nation would run like a well-oiled, utterly impartial machine. A revelation from Tulsi Gabbard about how our government operates, a couple of tweets from the UK, and a dive into Israel’s past all put the lie to this delusion.

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Flopping Aces reprinted a speech that Tulsi Gabbard gave about the real deep state, which isn’t a cabal of high-level operatives but is, instead, a collection of bureaucrats protecting their fiefdoms without regard for our constitutional system. (And of course, it goes without saying—and it’s important to note that Gabbard doesn’t say it—that most of these bureaucrats are Democrats.)

According to Gabbard, an unseen threat in America is the managerial class:

These are the people who operate quietly below the surface. They are the career officials, the senior administrators, the unelected managers of national security or intelligence, who see elections and the American voters as a nuisance because they think that they’re more important than any election, than any president, and that they are more qualified to run our country than those who [sic] we elect to serve our country as leaders.

With that introduction, Gabbard tells of the employee (who should be named) who used a typical bureaucratic technique we’ve all seen: slow-walking whatever the bureaucrat doesn’t like. In this case, Gabbard needed a placemat—that is, a big piece of paper with information she needed to share with President Trump for a meeting that morning. One person in the agency she chaired, who’d come from another agency, was responsible for getting this placemat to her.

But the placemat never came. Why not?

[B]ecause this guy who was responsible for printing refused to print it because he disagreed with what was on the paper. And turns out he actually did print it, but then he locked it in his desk and refused to open his desk.

My chief of staff went down and said, the director needs to present this to the president. We need this. And he said, no, I refuse.

And so my chief brought down my head of a general counsel who said, the director needs this for the president. I refuse. And he would not do this until his boss back at his home agency said it was okay to do it.

That, says Gabbard, is just one example of how our government works or, more accurately, doesn’t work.

Within minutes of reading that, I came across two tweets from England, one explaining how UK bureaucrats in 2002 concluded that it would be virtuous to destroy Britain’s indigenous people in favor of immigrants, and the other of which sums up how Britain arrived at its current Big Brother-ish status:

These three items, each describing bureaucrats pursuing their personal agendas without regard for elected governments, national needs, or even reality, reminded me of something. One of the best books most people have never heard of is Pierre van Paassen’s The Forgotten Ally, published in 1943, at the height of WWII, to discuss the role Jews from British-mandate Palestine played in defeating Rommel, a result Britain might not have been able to achieve without their aid. (My dad was one of those troops.) The Arabs, needless to say, sided with Rommel.

What interested me more, though, was how van Paassen, a Dutch Protestant journalist, described the early days of Jewish settlement in the British mandate. He was on the ground and knew all the players. I wrote about his book at some length here, but the short version is that the Jews and the Arabs were doing well together. Indeed, the Arabs were exceptionally grateful to the Jews who treated them with a respect and care they’d never received from either their long-time Ottoman overlords or the British.

Things changed, however, when Britain began staffing its local government in the 1920s as it tightened its civil control over the mandate (which it won after WWI). It chose second- and third-tier civil servants from other parts of Britain’s empire. They were often embittered people with singularly bad values who reveled in the chance to hold the bureaucratic power they’d been denied in their other positions. And to his credit, although all of them are long dead, van Paassen names names—as Tulsi should have with that petty bureaucrat who decided he was the ultimate boss.

In any event, aside from being petty antisemites, what really drove these British bureaucrats was one overriding goal: job security. The Jews were competent, efficient, dynamic, generous, and formed strong alliances with the resident Arabs, all of whom were the dismal raff and scaff of the Ottoman Empire, having drifted in beginning around the 1830s. In contrast, Jews have a continuous presence in the land dating back to the second millennium B.C., while Christians have been there since…well, Christ. (Here’s more information on the land’s demographics.)

To keep the Jews from sidelining them, van Paassen describes how these bureaucrats deliberately fomented Arab hatred and discontent against the Jews. It wasn’t about what would benefit Britain. It wasn’t about what would be best for the Jews and Arabs under their control. It was all about personal power.

Britain’s empire was built on its military strength, followed by a competent, patriotic bureaucracy. When the bureaucracy shifted and fell into the hands of utterly self-interested small men, it fell apart. And now, those same petty, self-interested, unpatriotic people control modern Britain.

These same people control America, too. Thankfully, though, President Trump is fighting back, aided by a Constitution that says very clearly, “You have no power here.”

(Postscript: In 1942, van Paassen, looking at FDR’s policies, predicted that, in 2042, America would elect a black socialist president. He was off by only 24 years. Now, there’s a distinct possibility that the next socialist president will be elected in 2028, unless patriots turn out in previously unseen numbers.)

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