Non-State Actress #4: Jewish Lizards Don't Run the Government
Meet Some of the Multilateral Mavens of America
Review: In the last issue of NSA, Pedal Boys, we talked about the reputation cost to the US generated by the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The explanation was built on our understanding of national power from the issue before (Breaking a DIME(FIL) Piece Into Pennies).
BLUF
Various conspiracy theories suggest the US government is home to a collection of non-human ‘Lizard People,’ dangerous and power-hungry members of something they call ‘the Deep State,’ and really any anti-semitic troupe that ignores reality. There is often overlap between the believers and repeaters of these theories and people who struggle to see and/or acknowledge the role of women in the world. As a result, they see empty space or convince themselves the Lizard People Chapter of the Illuminati are pulling strings…when it’s quite often “just” a bunch of exceedingly capable women. NSA is going to be talking *a lot* about these conspiracies, where they come from, and what to do about them, in the coming weeks. And we are going to start by introducing just a few of the rockstar women who I can confidentially say, based on direct personal knowledge, are absolutely not lizards. It will be fun and make explaining some enormous systems and concepts less boring/messy later.
NB: 27 January is the Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, and internationally recognized as Holocaust Remembrance Day. January 25, 2023 was International Women in Multilateralism Day. This issue of NSA (and really this entire project) is dedicated to the 12 million people, including the more than 6 million Jews, murdered during the Holocaust. May their memories fuel not only the destruction of autocratic powers but create and sustain an ever more free and just world.
Press Play
This week’s playlist features songs about spells and conspiracies, or songs with conspiracy theories connected to them. Campy? Maybe. Worth it? Absolutely.
Who Run the World?
It would be inappropriate of me to put together this issue without this obvious reference, but it’s also much too basic to rely on and ignores that in the US, the overwhelming majority of decision makers across various sectors are men. Alas, I figure it’s a playful-enough way to introduce just a few of the MLMs (Multilateral Mavens, of course) that are out there in public service with a little wink to various conspiracies re: specific groups ‘running the world.’
MLMs! But the Good Kind!
I promise we are not about to dive into the chaos of LuLaRoe (but you should absolutely look into that, especially because the wonderful Jill Filipovic is all over that documentary) but ponzi schemes are real icky.
The ‘ML’ in our ‘MLM’ stands for Multilateral. Multi means many, generally defined as more than two (bi-). Lateral, in the noun form, means side or sides. So: many sides. And many any sides means many interests, personalities, responsibilities, cultures…so many manys.
The last ‘M’? Mavens.
MLMs are women whose job requires them to work on behalf of the United States and represent the United States’ interests to and with more than one other actor (country, international organization, etc.) and WOW are there a lot of women in this line of work.
*Insert surprised face*
Interestingly enough, there are *also* a LOT of conspiracy theories about these same organizations and their behaviors. It’s almost like instead of acknowledging the existence and impact of capable women in public service, a lot of people chalk it up to Lizard People, the Jews, or - my personal favorite - Jewish Lizard People. Why a Lizard who has become a bar or bat mitzvah makes more sense to people than Women Doing Things Well…I do not know1. But we'll come back to that another time.
Let’s just do a quick overview of *some* of the multilateral organizations (also called International Organizations) and entities we’re talking about.
Here are 5 of my favorites that you may have not heard of:
1. Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC)
2. International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM)
3. International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)
4. COSPAS-SARSAT (Search and Rescue Satellite System)
5. International Rubber Study Group (IRSG)
The United States’ Department of State has a wonderfully useful list on one of the pages associated with the Bureau of International Organizations (IOs) listing all of the international organizations that a US government employee can be detailed or transferred to without quitting their current job. The current list, which you can see here and is VERY long (more than 140 organizations), doesn’t include all the international organizations the US participates in - just the ones that a federal employee can work at for a set period of time.
There are a ton of benefits to the transfer/detail model.
It’s slightly more nuanced than this, but thinking about it as being an employee at Disneyland who goes to work at Disney Paris to learn how they do it in France for a set period of time2. Disneyland still pays the employee’s salary and benefits, there is an agreement for how long the employee will be in Paris, and it gives the employee a chance to learn and grow while still contributing to the overall functions of Disney. Disney Paris is thrilled because they get an experienced employee to join their team for *very* little $$, and by accepting the Disneyland employee maybe they get to send a Disney Paris employee to California - like an exchange!
Said another way, transfers and details strengthen institutional knowledge and relationships, provide growth and learning opportunities for individuals, and are relatively low cost. Having US government employees detail or transfer to IOs is also a helpful way to maintain and expand US power and goodwill.
The transfer/detail model also contributes to some of those conspiracy theories we’ve been circling around.
Since so many IOs rely on participating countries to detail or transfer personnel, and the human capital contribution often correlates to the wealth of the partner nation (not every country can afford to pay the salary of employees who are at an IO while also filling the job that employee just left!) , it can look like the IOs are extensions of different governments. And since there aren’t a ton of job listings to get hired directly, it looks even murkier3. Again, why we jump to “Lizards from a Culture with Strong Feelings on Deli” as the answer…oy4.
Meet America’s MLMs
There are really SO many American women doing multilateral stuff that I am tempted to make a card game a la Pokemon. My biggest concern is that I am so bored of the trope that women fight with one another that we’d have to make a set of cards depicting various threats and then use the MLM’s skills as listed on their cards to, collectively, defeat the threat. Yeah… I’m probably going to do this5.
Anyway, here are 3 women (in alphabetical order) who are giving their very best on our collective behalf. I’ve intentionally selected these 3 women because they are SO different and yet work together on the same team at the State Department and we’ve talked a lot about DOD lately. I also selected them because they are currently serving as political appointees, which certain people believe is code for Lizard-Human Hybrid. They are:
Ambassador Laura S.H. Holgate
Ambassador Cindy Hensley McCain
Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield
They are also 10000% human - completely non-reptilian.
Ambassador Laura S.H. Holgate
Current Role: Protecting the galaxy from nuclear weapons, waste, and transnational drug and criminal networks as U.S Ambassador to United Nations International Organizations at Vienna including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Putting the Maven in MLM: Laura S.H. Holgate is basically responsible for 3+ generations of people - especially women- in nuclear weapons, energy, nonproliferation and arms control. Not only did she lead the US process for the 4 Nuclear Security Summits making her VERY familiar with all the relevant parties, she helped to found, build, and grow the most prolific nuclear-focused non-profit in America, is the co-founder and former co-leader of the most widely recognized effort to include and enable women in nuclear policy (Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy), and is universally respected and admired across the US national security world. Considering our inability to agree on seemingly anything else, it’s worth mentioning…and probably *also* a big part of why there isn’t a nuclear leader in the world that won’t stop what their doing and take her call. The US UN Team in Vienna did a *very* cool video to mark Ambassador Holgate’s first year in the role, and you can check it out here. Importantly, she also has a very cute dog, #TinatheGreyhound, who makes regular appearances on social media.
Hit Songs from the Year She Started Serving the Collective Good (1995): This is How We Do It (Montell Jordan), I Can Love You Like That (All-4-U), I’ll Be There For You - the Theme from Friends (The Remembrandts), and High & Dry (Radiohead).
Relevant Bio: This is Ambassador Holgate’s second time in her current role - she held the position from July 2016 through January 2017. She isn’t a career foreign service officer, but she is absolutely a career nuclear weapons and material expert. She joined the Department of Defense as a special coordinator for cooperative threat reduction in 1995. And why did the Department of Defense hire her? Because she had a Bachelors of Arts from Princeton, a Masters of Science from MIT, and spent 2 years doing research at Harvard’s Belfer Center.
After DOD, she directed the Department of Energy’s Office of Fissile Materials Disposition (how to get rid of weapons-grade plutonium). She spent 8 years as the Founding Vice President of the non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative, runnings its Russia and New Independent States program before returning to government in 2009 to serve as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism and Threat Reduction (making sure nuclear weapons weren’t used by terrorist groups or others) for 7 years.
Ambassador Holgate served as NTI’s Vice President for Materials Risk Management from 2018 to 2021 and headed back to Vienna to serve in her multi-hatted, multilateral role in December 2021.
Political appointee? Yes. World-renowned senior expert in her field? Also yes.
Ambassador Cindy Hensley McCain
Current Role: Feeding hungry people, preventing food waste, and enable sustainable agriculture as U.S Ambassador to the United Nations International Organizations at Rome / Food and Agriculture including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the World Food Programme
Hit Songs from the Year She Started Serving the Collective Good (1978): YMCA (The Village People), Macho Man (Macho Man), The WHOLE Grease Soundtrack, and Can’t Smile Without You (Barry Manilow).
Putting the Maven in MLM: Cindy Lou Hensley McCain is a perfect addition to this list of MLMs because her career path makes a LOT of sense to women but apparently less sense to men - resulting in a lot of conspiracy theories. Those theories ignore that she, like her colleagues on this list, is one of the senior most experts in her field. Why? Ambassador McCain, again like a lot of women (and maybe men, idk) in the world, started her career in one area, fell in love, pivoted to work to raise children and have a career simultaneously, and then was lucky enough to find a way to combine it all together. Apparently, this is confusing to some people who again are more comfortable with Lizards with Menorahs in positions of impact than the idea of a woman evolving as a person over ~44 years. This is a much more familiar story, or dream, for women than men and is worth telling. Enormous MLM energy.
Relevant Bio: Ambassador McCain’s career in service was intentional, but she’s been pretty public about international multilateral humanitarian work not being the original plan. McCain earned a Bachelors and Masters degree from University of Southern California in Special Education at a time when only 17% of American women finished college6. She was an early pioneer (and published researcher) in movement therapy for children with disabilities, especially those with Down Syndrome, and turned down a job at her family business to work as a special education teacher in her local Arizona public school district. She had no intention of leaving education, until she met a guy while on vacation with her parents in 1979 in Hawaii. And just like ABBA warned us could happen, they fell in love and were married 11 months later.
Now-Ambassador McCain spent the next several decades raising 4 children, enabling her husband’s career, starting and running a non-profit organization that ran 55 two-week long medical missions to areas in the immediate aftermath of crises (including Zaire, Kuwait - arriving less than a week after the end of the Gulf War, Bangladesh, El Salvador), worked her way up in corporate America, and building expertise. She also became one of the most impactful humanitarians, particularly in support of women and children, and THE most effective communicator in support of US-government foreign aid and assistance. She is also well-known for her ‘hands-on’(read: like, with her own hands) approach to removing landmines and caring for refugees and people forced to migrate. Each one of these highlights is indicative of being just like her colleagues- exceptional. And yet, McCain and other women like her (Meg Whitman, Michelle Obama, Indra Nooyi, to name a few) are treated so differently than their non-woman colleagues.
Honestly, it’s boring.
Some how though, the varied experience is not at all that varied. This woman is one of the most widely respected logistics professionals in the world. Under her leadership, Hensley and Company Beverage grew into one of the largest distributors of Anheuser-Busch on the planet. And why am I mentioning it? Because knowing how to gather, store, transport, and distribute food is mighty helpful when your job is to *checks notes* feed hungry people.
Political appointee? Yes. World-renowned senior expert in her field? Also yes.
Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield
Current Role: Representing the United States as a leader, partner, and friend to democracy as Leader of the Delegation to the United Nations with the rank of Ambassador, and Member of the President’s Cabinet.
Putting the Maven in MLM: Linda Thomas-Greenfield is a 35 year veteran of the Foreign Service and representative of the many career7 (non-appointed) leaders in national security and defense. She served as the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 2013-2017 and was then fired from the Foreign Service by the incoming administration - a move that was unheard of at the time. She ended up as the first of nearly 1500 career government experts fired or forced from the State Department from 2017-2020. She rejoined government in 2021 as a political appointee which is way less rare. In the case of the infamous LTG, it makes a whole lot of sense. She spent much of her time from 2017-2021 focused on ways to rebuild the State Department as an institution, which was really just a continuation of her efforts to mentor, sponsor, and support generations of her colleagues. Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield is an experienced hand during a time of chaos and fear - which is exactly what the UN needs.
Hit Songs from the Year She Started Serving the Collective Good (1982): Hold Me (Fleetwood Mac), That Girl (Stevie Wonder), Heat of the Moment (Asia), and Somebody’s Baby (Jackson Browne).
Relevant Bio: Linda Thomas-Greenfield earned a Bachelors from Louisiana State University in 1974 and a Masters of Public Administration from University of Wisconsin-Madison the following year. She was on her way to being full professor, teaching political science at Bucknell and finishing her doctorate from University of Wisconsin when she decided to join the Foreign Service instead in 1982.
In addition to being a former Assistant Secretary of State, she is also a former Director General of the Foreign Service and Human Resources. She’s had foreign postings in Switzerland at the UN, Jamaica, Pakistan, The Gambia, Kenya, and Nigeria, was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration from 2004-2006, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs from 2006-2008 and Ambassador to Liberia from 2008-2012. Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield has country-level, regional, subject-area, and system-wide expertise…and she’s got it in a region of the world that is at the center of so much. But this is all kind of dry and not really getting to the point…
LTG embodies and believes in a kind of diplomacy that she named ‘gumbo diplomacy,’ after her beloved home of Baker, Louisiana. Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield is certainly known for her professional acumen, but she’s equally admired for her genuine, direct, intentional compassion. It was widely reported that she was publicly nominated for her current role on a Tuesday and spent the next Wednesday and Thursday driving around to deliver Thanksgiving meals to colleagues who were away from family for the holiday… and it wasn’t a gimmick - she’s been like this since forever. Generations of State Department employees, especially women and people of color, have looked to Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield as a role model, a mentor, a sponsor, and a standard. She is the person so many strive to emulate in a way that crosses borders. Kind of ideal at the UN, no?
In her decades of service at the State Department, she worked alongside now-Secretary of State Tony Blinken and former Secretary, current Special Envoy John Kerry. Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield is also proudly open about her path to the Department. The oldest of 8 kids in a small town outside Baton Rouge that the Lizard-People Obsessed KKK terrorized on the reg, she attended and graduated public school for the entirety of her educational career. She has more in common with most Americans than so many of those that came before her and that really matters. The suggestion that her appointment is the result of a conspiracy is really dumb, and probably just someone being really racist.
Political appointee? Yes. World-renowned senior expert in her field? Also yes.
Just the Start
Sometimes we don’t how to explain the world around us, or why certain people have certain jobs, and instead of figuring out we’re just too tired so we say “because that’s how the world works.” Access to education, skills, experience, and networks certainly impact our lives. Acknowledge that, come to terms with it, and decide what you want to do with the information - don’t chalk it up to Lizards Meeting in a Shul Basement. And when you *think* Jewish Reptar is running the show, take a quick look - it’s probably just an exceptionally competent woman doing her job well.
Wrap Up
Conspiracy theories, like multilevel marketing schemes, are dangerous. Lizard people in the basement of a pizza parlor controlling the government and ‘get rich on Instagram with see-through leggings’ schemes can be really appealing, especially if you’re someone who is struggling. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the history of the world - especially from 1935-1945. Democracy requires us to do more than the bare minimum, and the women in this week’s NSA have done just that. Maybe we should join them instead of pretending they don’t exist?
I’m not making light of this. In fact, just the opposite. This acknowledgement is intentionally in passing because next month, Non-State Actress will record a number of live podcasts from the Munich Security Conference. The Episodes will be released alongside several issues exploring the relationships between anti-semitism, genocide, anti-democracy movements and lay the foundation for getting into the roots of NATO and why multi-national coalitions to defend freedom are in the US’ interest. It’s a lot, it’s heavy, and I cannot come up with a more comprehensive or effective way to do it than starting with a trip to Dachau and giving NSA readers a special look at what it’s like to be a Principal at MSC. All of the gratitude to my dear colleagues and friends Lisa Marie Ullrich and Benedikt Franke and their teams for embracing and enabling the opportunity.
Disney, please do not sue me. You were the first and best example that came to mind that was meaningful to our beloved audience.
There are some really cool opportunities directly from these organizations. Check some out here
Please see previous footnotes before yelling at me on the internet.
It’s already on the to-do list, so don’t worry.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/a-look-at-womens-education-and-earnings-since-the-1970s.htm
Being a member of the Foreign Service is sort of like being in the US military or Intelligence Community. You show up to work regardless of which party is or isn’t in charge and your not making policy - you’re implementing it.