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 Massacre at Béziers, which we do remember (it was the first major battle of the Albigensian Crusade) on July 22, 1209, just 811 years before Trump lost the presidential election by a few hundred thousand ballots, at least some of which were fraudulent, to an old pol who might 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 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. It’s time for Trump to get even — he owes that to his supporters — and to do good while he’s at it.
The administrative state has opposed him relentlessly 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 he was constitutionally elected to do.
You’re Fired
Now 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 100 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 200.
He should also fire the top 100 people at the Department of Justice. In theory, the department has been investigating how the Russia collusion story got started, and more particularly, who started it. They have delayed and delayed, however, with Attorney General William Barr just this week announcing he appointed John Durham as special counsel to probe Russiagate spying abuses. A Biden Justice Department will never charge anybody with wrongdoing. It’s time for the top offenders at the department to go.
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? Yes. Homeland Security? Another yes — it’s not clear we need either of these. Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Health and Human Services — they’ll all be better off without the top 100.
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.
This Is War
While we’re on the subject, we should rethink the whole concept of a “civil service.” The theory behind a civil service, as George Will wrote in his must-read new book “The Conservative Sensibility,” was that, per Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 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 Biden. Cass Sunstein, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Barack 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 or punish it in his final hours is praiseworthy.
It might be that 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 Wuhan virus pandemic. In the meantime, they can scramble around looking for employment. Some might 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 Trump ever, ever again.
Of course, some might not only get reinstated but also be awarded back pay. Fine, those funds will have to come out of the relevant agencies’ budgets, leaving less money for “programs,” and it’s the programs that damage the country. Trump then gets a double score by firing them.
Probably no one would say firing these people would be “nice.” Some “innocent” workers, perhaps even “conservative” workers will likely be fired too, but there’s always collateral damage in war. That’s why war is hell.
When Trump makes his spectacular return to Washington in 2025, however, a trembling civil service will remember the Massacre of 2020, even as today, 811 years later, we remember Arnaud-Amaury and the Massacre at Béziers.
