Don’t Worry, the State Department Won’t Let Our Government Dabble in Idol Worship

3 min readNow that Kash Patel has settled on a new motto for the FBI—FBI: Where Men Are Men And Sheep Are Nervous—we can move along to the work of other members of the administration's A team. For example, there's one Chris Landau, who is described as the No. 2 man at the State Department. According to Axios, Landau is relentlessly on point against the threat posed by ancient Babylonian deities.The second-most powerful man at the State Department put the brakes on a U.S. international exhibit featuring a bull statue because he worried it might look like Baal, a pagan god some associate with Satanic child sacrifice. The anecdote illustrates the quirky interests of Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau, according to department critics, who say he spends too much time on social media focusing on the unimportant.The issue revolves around an international exposition next year in Belgrade, Serbia, where the U.S. plans to feature a statue of a bucking bull at an exhibit celebrating the American West. On Aug. 19, at 4:15 p.m., Landau sent an email to staffers about it: "I remain somewhat concerned by the Golden Bull imagery! Did a quick internet search and don't want it to become a distraction. The golden calf from the Bible is often portrayed as a golden bull." Providing hyperlinked footnotes and images of golden bull worship, Landau explored the ancient history of Baal as well as the "Modern Cultural Comparisons." "The imagery of a golden bull or calf is frequently invoked metaphorically today," he wrote. "For instance, critics and commentators sometimes compare modern financial fixations—typified by the famous Charging Bull statue on Wall Street to the ancient worship of material idols." Oh, dear. He does His Own Research.The email, which was forwarded to multiple officials, elicited eyerolls and snickers inside the State Department. The bull statue was put on hold as State officials spent the last few weeks debating how to make it both interesting and non-Satanic. "It's just totally weird stuff and it's really indicative of the guy," a State Department official said. "Literally, no one thinks about Baal unless they're spending way too much time online, which Landau is," a different U.S. official lamented.It turns out that there's a kind of Baal Boom going on in what once we called the fringes of the Far Right, except the American Right has no "fringes" any more. It's all just a giant one-celled beast lurching around absorbing all manner of Crazy for fuel. This particular beast involves Xwitter, Iranian mobs, Candace Owens, and, yes, inevitably, the Epstein Files. At the same time, Landau seems to have gotten himself crossways with some of the more dubious folks in the president's orbit, including Paolo Zampolli, the entrepreneur who is said to have ties to Jeffrey Epstein through his "modeling agency," and who claims to have introduced the president to the First Lady. Zampolli is currently the administration's "Special Envoy" for "Global Partnerships." I mention all of this in case you were wondering whence all the stories about Landau's admittedly eccentric ideas about his job are coming.Anyway, back to the bull. Amazingly, the original plan was even worse.For the American West exhibit, the department's director of art in embassies, Erin Scavino, recommended featuring a mechanical bucking bull that people could ride. But that idea was scrapped after department officials determined that liability exposure in Serbia was too great.So we traded Gilley's Club for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Lookin' for Baal in all the wrong places.And consultants told Tim Walz to stop calling these people weirdos. It is to weep.