The Maoist struggle sessions hosted by the US State Department to help employees cope with Donald Trump’s election to a second term in the White House have drawn the attention of a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Californian Republican Darrell Issa, who is in the running to be the next chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, is demanding straight answers from Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
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As a Senior Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I write to you regarding reports of official post-election State Department therapy and listening sessions. I am concerned that the Department is catering to federal employees who are personally devastated by the normal functioning of American democracy through the provision of government-funded mental health counseling because Kamala Harris was not elected President of the United States.
Instead, on November 5, the American people resoundingly elected Donald J. Trump as the 47th President of the United States – a decisive repudiation of four years of failed Biden-Harris foreign policy. It is disturbing that ostensibly nonpartisan government officials would suffer a personal meltdown over the results of a free and fair election, something the United States champions around the world. It is unacceptable that the Department accommodates this behavior and subsidizes it with taxpayer dollars.
Furthermore, the mere fact that the Department is hosting these sessions raises significant questions about the willingness of its personnel to implement the lawful policy priorities that the American people elected President Trump to pursue and implement. The Trump Administration has a mandate for wholesale change in the foreign policy arena, and if foreign service officers cannot follow through on the American people’s preferences, they should resign and seek a political appointment in the next Democrat administration.
The Free Beacon reported a week after the election that the State Department was paying for the equivalent of political grief counseling as the pro-Hamas faction came to grips with the fact that it was no longer calling the shots.
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The State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which oversees American diplomacy in the war-torn Middle East, also held a group discussion Friday with assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs Barbara Leaf and acting undersecretary for political affairs John Bass, according to three sources briefed on the matter.
One source described the meeting as a “cry session” over Trump’s victory, which is likely to usher in wholesale change at Foggy Bottom. Officials in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs have been working for months to sanction the Jewish government and withhold critical arms shipments, alleging Israel is not doing enough to provide humanitarian aid in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. They are said to have discussed the difficulty of Trump’s victory and urged employees to share their feelings in private settings.
“For four years, within the rank and file, there has been an over emphasis on people’s feelings, often with a college campus-like fervor, rather than the work of advancing America’s interests,” one U.S. official with knowledge of the meetings told the Free Beacon.
“This meeting was hopefully the last gasp of that,” the source said, adding that there is “lots to unf—k” at the State Department after four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
No one has ever accused Foggy Bottom of having an overabundance of masculinity, courage, or common sense, but this, like when I discuss the Air Force with my daughter, exceeds anything that I could have imagined. If people are so fragile that they require mental health intervention when their candidate loses an election or when they don’t get their way on a policy, they need to be immediately removed from access to power and sent off to do something less strenuous.
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The original story and this letter by Representative Issa go to the very core of what President Trump and Secretary Rubio will face when taking office. The civil service and foreign service workforce that bills itself as “apolitical” and “non-partisan” is actually highly political and extraordinarily partisan. You can count on internal resistance, leaks, and sabotage. You can also count on them being unable to distinguish forbearance from weakness.
Rubio must go in hard, bearing a writ of fire and sword. People either need to loyally carry out the directions they receive or then need to be made an example of.
Read the Letter
Rep. Issa Letter to Sec. Blinken on Post Election Therapy Sessions by streiff on Scribd