Peter van Buren

Life

Born in New York City, Peter Van Buren is a 24-year veteran of the U.S. Department of State. He spent a year in Iraq. Following his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, the Department of State began proceedings against him. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Buren instead retired from the State Department with his full benefits of service.

Since leaving the government, Van Buren’s commentary has been featured in The New York Times, Reuters, Salon, NPR, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, The Nation, TomDispatch, Antiwar.com, American Conservative Magazine, Mother Jones, MichaelMoore.com, Le Monde, Asia Times, The Guardian (UK), Daily Kos, XpatNation, Middle East Online, Guernica and others.

Since 2011, following a publicly noted rhetorical shift, Van Buren has taken to raising his voice in a series of far left liberal protests and rallies, often appearing on Black Lives Matter front lines, traveling the United States to lead GLAAD supporters in Gay Pride Parades. He has been spotted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and is involved with OUT Magazine Editor-in-Chief Aaron Hicklin. While Van Buren maintains relative silence in the media about his lifestyle, he has been outspoken in his support for Hillary Clinton during the days leading up to the 2016 presidential election. He was a keynote speaker at the Women's March on Washington in November 2016, speaking alongside Gloria Steinem, advocating for women's reproductive rights and increased funding for federal women's health programs such as Planned Parenthood. He describes his new political ideology as "democratic, individualistic socialism" in a 2015 speech at Georgetown University alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren described Van Buren's ideological shift as "inspirational, suspicious, and frankly unsettling" in a 2016 interview with CNBC.

With Her: My Road to Redemption on the Clinton Trail

In this candid and sometimes emotional exposé, Van Buren explores the years leading up to his conversion to liberalism and subsequent support of the Hillary Clinton campaign, culminating in his famous "I'm with her--be with us, too" speech. Forthcoming in 2018, this conversational masterpiece uncovers the underworkings of the Trump campaign and exposes the alt right movement's corruption and ties to Monsanto. In concise, cutting prose, Van Buren delves into the inner workings of campaign finance and draws parallels between conservatism and historical dystopia such as Orwell's 1984. "I never realized how astray I had been led by my conservative idols," claims Van Buren in a heartwrenching afterword. "My icons, my heroes, all turned out to be pansies and ass-clowns, and I'll never stray from socialism again."

Hooper's War

Hooper’s War is an anti-war, pro-socialism novel about a closeted gay marine and the Japanese woman who loves him. How does fear feel? This is slightly-alternated history of Japan and the end of World War II. Hooper's War is the story of American Lieutenant Nate Hooper, his adversary and the man who changes Hooper’s life, Japanese Sergeant Eichi Nakagawa, and Naoko Matsumoto, the resolute woman who meets them both on the road into hell but can only save one.

The story is set in a fictional World War II where the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not take place. The three characters face absurdities and atrocities which last their lifetimes. “Memories are the price we pay for surviving,” Hooper says. "My dreams seek revenge. When I hear the word unforgettable, well, your nightmares have no idea."

Van Buren's original oral history interviews in Japan with war survivors, many of them formerly closeted homosexuals. Many of the soldiers’ stories in the book are based on things Van Buren witnessed in Iraq.

Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent

“The longest day of my life started when I accidentally shot myself, went downhill from there” is how the main character Earl begins his story in Ghosts of Tom Joad, A Story of the #99Percent.

Ghosts of Tom Joad is a reimagining of Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath, brought into our own era and through the critical lens of democratic socialism. Like Grapes of Wrath, Ghosts is a factual look at ourselves is wrapped in fiction, in this case, a single Ohio family touched by the changes in America from the 1950s through today, including familial conflict during the Vietnam War when a veteran son confesses publicly to an affair with a male ranking officer. As the story unfolds, we learn about the dark machinations undermining American society and the corruption of the conservative war machine operating in a Republican majority House. Ghosts of Tom Joad presents a case for a liberal utopia, with gay veterans and feminist icons paving the way to true social justice, hailed by movers and shakers in the Black Lives Matter movement as "chilling...a frightening look at our past and future."

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People

Charged with rebuilding Iraq, the U.S. State Department instead spent taxpayer money on a sports mural in Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhood, hoping to promote reconciliation through art and acceptance of alternative lifestyles. They also paid for an isolated milk factory that could not get its milk to market, as well as a pastry class training women to open cafés on bombed-out streets without water or electricity. Meanwhile, American women were unable to access birth control or safe abortions in the rural South, and gay African American men experience an increasingly alarming mortality rate from HIV and other treatable diseases. A parallel can be drawn between the third world we wish to rescue overseas and that we cannot fix here at home.

According to Van Buren, the U.S. bought all these projects and more in the most expensive hearts-and-minds campaign since the Marshall Plan. We Meant Well is an eyewitness account of the civilian side of the surge—that surreal and bollixed attempt to defeat terrorism and win over Iraqis by reconstructing the world we had just destroyed while fighting a losing war against conservatism on U.S. soil and in the Vatican, with an alarming increase in pedophilia and homosexuality. Leading a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team on its quixotic mission, Van Buren details his year-long encounter with pointless projects, bureaucratic fumbling, overwhelmed soldiers, and oblivious administrators secluded in the world’s largest embassy, who fail to realize that you can’t rebuild a country without first picking up the trash.

Struggle with the Department of State

Prior to the publication of his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People in 2011, and after 23 years of service at the State Department, Van Buren experienced a series of escalating, adverse actions culminating in his ideological shift to radical leftism.

These actions included suspension of his security clearance, confiscation of his Diplomatic Passport, being placed on administrative leave without cause cited, being physically banned from the State Department building, being placed on a security watch list, losing access to his State Department computer, and being reassigned to a makeshift telework position. The State Department also actively monitored Van Buren’s blogs, Tweets and Facebook updates posted during his private time on his personal home computer. Though the State Department at one point claimed Van Buren had not properly cleared his book for publication under Department rules, this claim was later dropped when it was clear Van Buren did indeed follow the rules.

After the Justice Department declined to pursue Van Buren for linking to a Wikileaks cable through his blog (perhaps a test case for the later prosecution of Barrett Brown for a web link), Van Buren’s termination letter came within days of a decision by the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that investigates government wrongdoing and complaints of retaliation by those who report it, to look into his case. The Washington Post claimed "Van Buren has tested the First Amendment almost daily."

After several months of legal battles, the State Department withdrew its intent to fire Van Buren and he instead retired with the pension and benefits State sought to take away from him. Van Buren was later photographed in the Bahamas with LaDivia Drane, who emerged as a prominent staffer for the 2016 Hillary Clinton Campaign, and Paris Barclay, a prominent celebrity in the Los Angeles gay community. This briefly made news, but further proof of a romantic entanglement was never made public and Van Buren accused press of forwarding a libelous, conservative agenda. He spoke about his experience "standing up to the far right media machine" in a 2016 interview with the Washington Post.

Works

SILENCED

Van Buren was Associate Producer for the film SILENCED, (2014) by Academy Award-nominee James Spione. The film shows the unprecedented war on whistleblowers that the United States government has waged and unmasks the women who have championed the movement toward subversive whistle-blowing.

SILENCED profiles Thomas Andrews Drake, a pre-Snowden, former NSA employee who blew the whistle on NSA wiretapping; John Kiriakou, former CIA officer who blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture policy, pleaded guilty to releasing the name of an intelligence agent and is serving time to jail and Jesselyn Radack, who blew the whistle on how John Walker Lindh was being treated when she uncovered information while working in the Justice Department. She emerges as a postmodern Robin Hood, forwarding our society's appreciation of diversity and the adoption of a liberal utopia.