War is Hell — Today as During the Albigensian Crusade

Arnaud-Amaury is not exactly a household name in America, but Donald Trump could change that. Arnaud-Amaury was the Cistercian monk who commanded the church’s forces at the Battle of Béziers (which we do remember: it was the first major battle of the Albigensian Crusade) on July 22, 1209, just 811 years before Donald Trump lost the presidential election by a few hundred thousand fraudulent ballots to an old pol who may be the most corrupt person ever elected to the office of president of the United States.

The story is that when Arnaud-Amaury led his soldiers into the city of Béziers they informed him that they were unable to distinguish between the heretics and the faithful. Arnaud-Amaury is said to have replied: “Kill them all. God can tell which are His.”

If that’s good enough for a ninth-century Cistercian monk, it ought to be good enough for Donald Trump, whose place in the history books to be written by the left-wing, woke “intellectuals” and their ilk cannot possibly be lowered by anything he says or does from now until the Day of Judgment.

For Donald Trump, it’s time to get even (he owes that to his supporters)—as well as to do good while he’s at it.

He has been opposed relentlessly by the administrative state since the day he took office—actually since before he took office, as the deep staters laid the groundwork for either removing him or paralyzing him: which is to say, preventing him from doing the work that he was constitutionally elected to do.

Now Donald Trump, channeling his inner Arnaud-Amaury, should do what he should have done as soon as he took office: remove deep staters wholesale, starting, obviously, with the FBI and the CIA. He should fire the top one hundred people at both agencies. The FBI’s performance has been disgraceful, both at the beginning of the Trump presidency (the Russia collusion hoax and the Mueller faux-investigation) and at the end, with the cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Make that two hundred.

And he should fire the top one hundred people at the Department of Justice too, including, most especially, the elusive and invisible John Durham. They (whoever “they” are) have in theory been investigating how the Russia collusion story got started, and more particularly, who started it. But they have delayed, and delayed, and delayed—and now whatever they may find will be of no use. A Biden Justice Department will never charge anybody with wrongdoing. That probably was their game plan all along. It’s time for the top one hundred to go. Make that a hundred and fifty.

Like Mao, Trump should march through the institutions laying waste wherever he goes. State Department? Absolutely! Education? Of course: there shouldn’t be a Department of Education. Housing and Urban Development? Of course. Even Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, who was the third secretary of the department, said he wasn’t sure it should exist. Homeland Security? Yes, and it’s not clear we need it either. Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Health and Human Services: They’ll all be better off without the top one hundred.

But is all this firing “legal”? Who can tell? Taking a lead from Arnaud-Amaury, Trump should fire them all, and let History sort it out.

And while we’re on the subject, the whole concept of a “civil service” should be rethought. The theory behind a civil service, as George Will writes in his must-read new book The Conservative Sensibility, was that, per Hegel, giving the bureaucrats secure employment would purge any temptation of self-interestedness. Ha! The residents of the District of Columbia voted 93 percent for Joe Biden. Cass Sunstein, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Obama, said Washington was afflicted with too much “partyism” and recommended “delegation, and in particular in strengthening the hand of technocratic forces in government.” Double Ha!

The administrative state is essentially undemocratic: it promises expertise in lieu of democracy, i.e., rule by woke progressives over deplorables. Anything Trump can do to weaken it—or punish it—in his final hours is praiseworthy.

It may be that President Joe Biden could simply hire back all the people Trump fired. Perhaps, but there are rules about hiring people, which might delay their return by months, perhaps many months, especially during the Chinese Flu pandemic. In the meantime, they can scramble around looking for employment. Some may find better jobs and never return. Some will have a permanent distaste for federal employment. Some will move away.

And some will never vote for Donald Trump ever, ever again. Ever.

Of course, some of them may not only get reinstated, but be awarded back pay as well. Fine. Those funds will have to come out of the relevant agencies’ budgets, leaving less money for “programs”—and it’s the programs that do the damage to the country. So Trump gets a double score by firing them.

Would firing all those people be “nice”?

No.

No, probably not.

No, probably no one would say firing them would be nice.

Will some “innocent” workers, perhaps even “conservative” workers, get fired too? Yes, probably. There’s always collateral damage in war. That’s why war is Hell.

But when Trump makes his spectacular return to Washington in 2025 (the greatest comeback since . . . Nixon?), a trembling civil service will remember the Massacre of 2020, even as today, 811 years later, we remember Arnaud-Amaury and the Battle of Béziers.

Published:

December 2, 2020
The Federalist