The idea that the State Department is non-political is laughable. Having known many people in the State Dept for the last 30 years, all I can say is that Keith Laumer’s “Retief” series was absolutely spot-on. I am starting to think that only sociopaths can exist in that environment.
Heard of Keith Laumer but never read those. Could you summarize, please?
Correct. When Obama was elected I found myself as the only conservative in a misison of 25 members of the foreign service. Had I not been their communications expert they probably would have never spoke to me.
Being in the room where every single person thinks they are the smartest person in the room sucks. Every single person at State has an elevated sense of their own superior intelligence. During every course you take, you do the Myer’s Briggs and everyone knows exactly what they are - you can game it to your desired personality traits. When I joined I was told I was selected form a pool of over 1900 applications as the only one selected; that all my classmates were of the same caliber. By the time I left state it was up to 2600 applicants for every position selected. The worst thing is that under Obama fully 20% selected were for genderbender backfills - thus we know we were not getting much in the way of quality, but they all seemed to believe they were smarter than you.
I found that everyone at State was a hard core marxist. They were open in their hatred of Christians, military veterans, white men, and they loved their homosexuals. I have seen people wearing a cross told to hide because it offended them.
Liberals are the worst. Many of them would claim their parent died in every assignment until someone finally figured it out around 2009, but some of women at my mission had used that trick for free furneral trips 14-17 times and nothing was done to recover the money.
I learned to HATE at the State Department. I hated myself for joining, and I hated most the liberals I worked with. There are no cute or normal liberals; they are all college created monsters on a mission. They are social/socialist foot soldiers.
Many will tell you they hate America. In the next breath they are patting themselves on the back for being America’s Royality, because that’s what we are told in our three weeks at State during orientation.
They will screw each other over and lie about each other just to destroy someone’s career because they feel like in every assignment they need to thin the herd for their next promotion.
I was in my late 40s when I joined while working overseas. I had retired and always been successful. I was gratified and shocked, and did not expect to be selected when I went back to DC on my own dime for the interviews. I was there for 3 hours and told congratulations, that most of them would be there until 7 pm if not sent home without an offer. Being older and conservative, I was cautioned that my those with my worldview would be mostly in the Diplomatic Security and Information Resources, which was true.
Liberals can only exist in an environment where rules are broken; conservatives are only allowed because lives depend on us and critical information systems cannot be DEI staffed.
Wow, I read and enjoyed a bunch of them back in the 1970s.... Hadn’t thought of them for decades. Thanks for the reminiscence!