What Happened Today: April 14, 2023

The leaker is a 21 year old gamer nerd; Kidney transplants get the equity treatment; Vaccine bonuses for your doctor's office

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The Big Story

Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, 21, was charged in federal court Friday morning for “unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material.” Teixeira, an enlisted soldier in the Air National Guard’s Massachusetts intelligence unit, apparently acquired a bevy of top-secret documents, which he began sharing with his online gaming buddies as early as last October. The documents—which described everything from Ukrainian battle plans to Russian squabbles between military leadership to Israeli Mossad private communications—may be one of the biggest leaks in American history. Teixiera was the administrator of an online gaming group called Thug Shaker Central that focused on war simulation games, and his fellow group members said he shared the documents because he wanted to teach them about real war. From there, the documents made their way into other chat groups and started circulating more widely in March of this year.

When questioned on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland had no explanation for how someone so junior could have had access to the documents, but The New York Times reported on Friday that “tens of thousands” of people have the same clearance as Teixeira, that it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Washington Times Pentagon reporter and ex-Army officer Mike Glenn isn’t so sure. Writing on Twitter, Glenn said, “I have some idea how the security clearance sausage is made. So, even with my clearance (and as an active duty officer) I never got my hands on briefing documents for the most senior Pentagon officials. So, I ask the question again: how does a junior Air Guardsman get his hands on that G2? Still waiting.”

The implications of the leak are numerous, but an immediate one may be the expansion of the domestic surveillance program. The Biden administration is not letting this crisis go to waste. According to an unnamed congressional official, U.S. intelligence services are looking to monitor online chat rooms more aggressively to prevent future leaks. But Glenn Gerstell, who was general counsel of the National Security Agency from 2015 to 2020, assured NBC News, “We do not have nor do we want a system where the United States government monitors private internet chats.” 

Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-looking-into-how-accused-leaker-accessed-top-secret-documents-6c6b0972

In The Back Pages: The Codevilla Tapes

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The Rest

→ Thread of the Day:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1646682082062606336

Independent journalist and scourge of his former employers Glenn Greenwald took to Twitter on Thursday to lambast the corporate media for its almost giddy devotion to U.S. Department of Defense operations security, peppering the Pentagon’s spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder with question after question about how the DoD plans to prevent leaks in the future. These journalists want fewer juicy dishes from inside the government, not more! If Deep Throat asked them for a meeting, they’d cover their ears and tell him to choke on cheesecake. By the way, The Scroll’s tip line is thedailyscroll@protonmail.com.

→ On Wednesday, California Superior Court judge Evette Pennypacker (not a typo) ordered Calvary Chapel San Jose to pay $1.2 million in fines for violating COVID-19 restrictions. In May 2020, the church’s pastor, Mike McClure, said he was reopening with no mask requirement in spite of the state’s harsh restrictions on in-person gatherings—BLM protests excluded, of course—and for that, the church is being hit. The church is appealing and filing a suit of its own against Santa Clara County, alleging that the county was surveilling its church-going residents, even using cell phone data to track their whereabouts. We at The Scroll would never suggest that when the state uses its power to track and punish people of faith, it tends to end poorly.

→ As of Jan. 5, 2023, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network changed its policy for evaluating eligibility for a kidney transplant in order to further the cause of “equity.” The new policy erases the distinction in measurement of kidney-function parameters between Black and non-Black patients, in spite of the fact that, biologically, African American patients have higher creatinine levels to begin with. In other words, the new policy will move people onto the transplant list even if they aren’t physically the most in need. According to Stanley Goldfarb, former associate dean of curriculum at UPenn Medicine, writing in City Journal, the OPTN is also considering changing its long-standing policy of prioritizing past donors for future transplants because too many of them are white. And it’s not just race-based policies invading the world of medicine. A whistleblower at University of Florida Health shared a memo with The Florida Standard that shows the hospital laboratory will be removing male and female reference ranges on diagnostic tests in the name of “inclusivity.”

→ Apparently, a gender-inclusivity pamphlet that has been floating around the hallowed halls of Goldman Sachs since 2019 is really starting to stick in the craw of employees there. The New York Post spoke to anonymous employees about the pronoun guide, which runs down the she/her, he/him, they/them, and ze/zir options available to the modern investment banker and encourages them to “replace gendered language with gender-inclusive language wherever possible in every day conversation.” The hypocrisy is just too much for some at the notoriously misogynist bank, with one insider telling the Post, “Perhaps start by getting rid of … those who harass women, and then maybe the women here will take their diversity and inclusivity issues seriously.”

→ Zeppelin Lyric of the Day: 

In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man. Now I’ve reached that age, I’ve tried to do all those things the best I can. No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam. Good times, bad times, you know I’ve had my share. When my woman left home for a brown-eyed man, but I still don’t seem to care. 

Because the weather is glorious and it’s time to rock. You’ve heard of Yacht Rock, but don’t forget Shabbat Rock.

→ A new report in Nikkei Asia, which examined Russian customs data for most of 2022, found that hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of American semiconductors are being sold to Russia in spite of sanctions against the state. Three-quarters of the chips were shipped from China, and a large percentage were from small resale companies that have many ways of acquiring the highly sought-after components necessary for missile guidance systems and other military applications. While the corporations involved, including Intel, and the U.S. government are trying to make sure their chips don’t fall into the wrong hands, it’s very difficult to stop the perpetrators, who often operate through shell companies and are able to change offices or company names on a dime. 

Read More: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Special-report-How-U.S.-made-chips-are-flowing-into-Russia

→ Tweet of the Day:

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1646696738013454336

Republican Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie shared this photo today on Twitter, showing a document from Kentucky’s insurance provider Anthem Blue Cross that outlined a bonus structure for doctors offices that reached certain quotas of COVID-19-vaccinated patients. This isn’t a terribly new concept, however. Blue Cross also gives to pediatricians $400 per fully vaccinated 2-year-old patient, with the list of currently recommended vaccines including DTaP, MMR, etc. The only catch is that the pediatricians have to prove that at least 63% of all their patients are fully vaccinated, or they lose the whole bonus.

→ As the Trump administration’s Title 42 rule, allowing Border Security to easily deport migrants, is set to expire on May 11, the area across from El Paso, Texas, is filling up with tens of thousands of migrants from Central and South America waiting to attempt the crossing. Hundreds of migrants fed up with waiting have been surrendering to Border Patrol authorities in recent days, hoping to be granted asylum. The waves have been so hard to handle at El Paso that the government is flying some migrants to San Diego and Laredo to be processed. On Monday, so many migrants attempted to cross the Paso Del Norte bridge into El Paso that it had to be shut down. Meanwhile conditions on the Mexican side of the border have been and remain terrible for the people, including children, who have made the long journey, often on false hope provided by greedy cartels who just want their money.

→ RIP Al Jaffee, American Jewish comic-strip genius of Lithuanian shtetl stock. Jaffee died Monday in New York at the amazing old age of 102 after a life filled with great odysseys and a sterling reputation as Mad Magazine’s end-page feature artist since 1964. Jaffee—whose mother took him from Savannah, Georgia, back to her shtetl when he was age 6 because she was fed up with the secular American culture, before she died in the Holocaust—also created a memorable and long-lived comic strip in The Moshiach Times, called “The Shpy,” about a secret-agent rabbi. Jaffee only retired from his comic duties a few years ago, at age 99. May we all live such a profound, long, productive life. Zichrono livracha.

→ Quote of the Day:

The decline of male literary fiction is not down to a feminist conspiracy in publishing houses, nor is it evidence that the novel itself is in decline. Reality is simpler. If men cannot dominate the literary landscape, cannot walk into lists like Granta’s, deservingly or not, they will look for other landscapes to colonise. If serious—and unserious—male novelists of stature are held in contempt, then why risk your reputation on something that pays as badly as writing fiction.

Thursday’s release of the 20 best young British novelists by literary magazine and publisher Granta included only four men, leading Will Lloyd at the New Statesman to ask, “How did male literary novelists become uncool?” He explains his theory in the above quote, although Tablet contributor and Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad Alex Perez made waves in a September interview with Hobart Pulp editor in chief Elizabeth Ellen in which he precisely blamed a feminist quasi-conspiracy in publishing houses, saying, “These women, perhaps the least diverse collection of people on the planet, decide who is worthy or unworthy of literary representation. Their worldview trickles down to the small journals, too, which are mostly run by woke young women or bored middle-aged housewives. This explains why everything reads and sounds the same, from major publishing houses to vanity zines with a readership of fifteen. The progressive/woke orthodoxy is the ideology that controls the entire publishing apparatus.”

Read More: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/04/decline-literary-bloke

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Long Goodbye by Blake Smith

How Andrea Long Chu became a latter-day Saul of Tarsus in her journey from guilty white man to taboo-breaking Asian woman

The Funny Frum Women of Social Media by Kylie Ora Lovell

Orthodox women are making TikTok and Instagram viewers laugh

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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This piece was originally published in Tablet Magazine, October 2019.

The Codevilla Tapes

The historian of American statecraft and spycraft and conservative political philosopher Angelo Codevilla talks about the ruling elite, Jonathan Pollard, and the rise of the techno-surveillance state—and the consequent demise of the American Empire

By David Samuels

No one runs America. That’s the terror and the beauty of American life in a nutshell, the answer to the secret of how 300 million people from many different places can live together between two oceans, sharing a future-oriented outlook that methodically obliterates any ties to the past. All prior lived experience is transformed into science fiction, or else into self-serving evidence of the present-day moral, intellectual, and technological superiority of the brave imagineers who are fortunate enough to live here, in the Now, while all who came before them are cursed. No one can or does control such fantasy-driven machinery, which seems incapable of operating in any other way than it does, i.e., in a space with no beginning and no end, but tending always toward perfection. Learning to accept imperfection and failure may be an emotionally healthy way for adults to negotiate the terrors and absurdities of human existence, but it is not the highway to the perfectibility of man or woman-kind.

Because the large-scale explanations that Americans offer each other about how their country works, or doesn’t work, arise from working backwards from the expectation of some future storybook perfection, they tend to be either childishly conspiratorial or cartoonishly stupid—because those are the types of explanation that tend to win out once you stipulate an ever-more-perfect-and-glorious future as the inevitable outcome of whatever snake oil it is that you are pitching to the suckers. In today’s America, these explanations come in the form of shallow and sweeping identitarian polemics (“white people” or “globalists” run “everything”), indecipherable academese backed by graphed coefficients (people are motivated by “rational self-interest,” as calculated by academics), or as appeals to a glorified and abstracted historical past (“the Founding Fathers,” “the melting pot”) whose promises of future perfection may have seemed real enough to past generations, but must now grow ever more distant with every new iteration of Moore’s law.

Which is not to say that America isn’t governed by an elite class, just like China, or Japan, or France is—only that the ability of that class to actually rule anything is even more constrained by the native culture. The idea that an advanced technologically driven capitalist or socialist society of several hundred million people can be run by something other than an elite is silly or scary—the most obvious present-day alternative being a society run by ever-advancing forms of AI, which will no doubt have only the best interests of their flesh-and-blood creators at heart.

Yet it is possible to accept all of this, and to posit that the reason that the American ruling class seems so indisputably impotent and unmoored in the present is that there is no such thing as America anymore. In place of the America that is described in history books, where Henry Clay forged his compromises, and Walt Whitman wrote poetry, and Herman Melville contemplated the whale, and Ida Tarbell did her muckraking, and Thomas Alva Edison invented movies and the light bulb, and so forth, has arisen something new and vast and yet distinctly un-American that for lack of a better term is often called the American Empire, which in turn calls to mind the division of Roman history (and the Roman character) into two parts: the Republican, and the Imperial.

While containing the ghosts of the American past, the American Empire is clearly a very different kind of entity than the American Republic was—starting with the fact that the vast majority of its inhabitants aren’t Americans. Ancient American ideas about individual rights and liberties, the pursuit of happiness, and so forth, may still be inspiring to mainland American citizens or not, but they are foreign to the peoples that Americans conquered. To those people, America is an empire, or the shadow of an empire, under which seemingly endless wars are fought, a symbol of their own continuing powerlessness and cultural failure. Meanwhile, at home, the American ruling elites prattle on endlessly about their deeply held ideals of whatever that must be applied to Hondurans today, and Kurds tomorrow, in fits of frantic-seeming generosity in between courses of farm-to-table fare. Once the class bond has been firmly established, everyone can relax and exchange notes about their kids, who are off being credentialed at the same “meritocratic” but now hugely more expensive private schools that their parents attended, whose social purpose is no longer to teach basic math or a common history but to indoctrinate teenagers in the cultish mumbo-jumbo that serves as a kind of in-group glue that binds ruling class initiates (she/he/they/ze) together and usefully distinguishes them from townies during summer vacations by the seashore.

The understanding of America as an empire is as foreign to most Americans as is the idea that the specific country that they live in is run by a class of people who may number themselves among the elect but weren’t in fact elected by anyone. Under whatever professional job titles, the people who populate the institutions that exercise direct power over nearly all aspects of American life from birth to death are bureaucrats—university bureaucrats, corporate bureaucrats, local, state and federal bureaucrats, law enforcement bureaucrats, health bureaucrats, knowledge bureaucrats, spy agency bureaucrats. At each layer of specific institutional authority, bureaucrats coordinate their understandings and practices with bureaucrats in parallel institutions through lawyers, in language that is designed to be impenetrable, or nearly so, by outsiders. Their authority is pervasive, undemocratic, and increasingly not susceptible in practice to legal checks and balances. All those people together comprise a class.

Another thing that residents of the broad North American expanse between Canada and Mexico have noticed is that the programs and remedies that this class has promoted, both at home and abroad, have greatly enriched and empowered a small number of people, namely themselves—while the broader American population continues to decline in wealth, health, and education. Meanwhile, the American Empire that the ruling elite administers is collapsing. The popularity of such observations on both the left and the right is what accounts for the rise of Donald Trump, on one hand, and of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other hand, among an electorate that has not been historically distinguished by its embrace of radicalism. Add those voter bases together, and perhaps 75% of Americans would seem to agree that their country, however you think of it, is in big trouble, and that the fault lies with the country’s self-infatuated and apparently not-so-brilliant elite.

Every student of history has their own theory about how and why empires fall. My theory is this: The wealth of any empire flows disproportionately to the capital, where it nourishes the growth, wealth, and power of the ruling elite. As the elite grows richer and more powerful, the gulf between the rulers and the ruled widens, until the beliefs and manners of the elite bear little connection to those of their countrymen, whom they increasingly think of as their clients or subjects. That distance creates resentment and friction, in response to which the elite takes measures to protect itself. The more wealth and power the elite controls, the more insulation it must purchase. Disastrous mistakes are hailed as victories or are made to appear to have no consequences at all, in order to protect the aura of collective infallibility that protects ruling class power and privilege.

What happens next is pretty much inevitable in every time and place—Spain, France, Great Britain, Moghul India, you name it: Freed from the laws of gravity, the elite turns from the hard work of correct strategizing and wise policymaking to the much less time-consuming and much more pleasant work of perpetuating its own privileges forever, in the course of which endeavor the ruling elite is revealed to be a bunch of idiots and perverts who spend their time prancing around half naked while setting the territories they rule on fire. The few remaining decent and competent people flee this revolting spectacle, while the elite compounds its mistakes in an orgy of failure. The empire then collapses.

In the hopes of confirming or disproving my theory, I recently traveled out to a vineyard in Plymouth, Northern California where I found Angelo Codevilla, who along with Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is one of the few American political philosophers who combines a deep sense of the Western moral and philosophical traditions with a hard-nosed sense of how the American political system actually works. While I am naturally more inclined toward Walzer-ism, I thought it would be fair minded to give Codevilla a hearing, despite the fact that he identifies as a conservative Catholic rather than as a liberal Northeastern Jew. As a sometime student of intelligence work, I will also admit to being an attentive reader of Codevilla’s book Informing Statecraft, which together with Norman Mailer’s novel Harlot’s Ghostoffers a fair guide to the karmic evolution of the U.S. intelligence community. Codevilla’s former boss in the U.S. Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had this to say about his protégé’s book:

Woodrow Wilson once spoke of the demands that would be made on Presidents in the age to come; demands of a kind that could only be met by “wise and prudent athletes, a small class.” Such is Angelo Codevilla; one of the small class of intelligence analysts who has actually been there. Read him; although I plead: Do not invariably agree!

What follows is an edited record of our conversation, which began when I arrived at the Codevilla vineyard in the evening and then continued the next morning, after the Codevillas invited me to spend the night at their house and then served me a delicious breakfast.

THE RULING ELITE

David Samuels: In 2010, you wrote an article, which then became a book, in which you predicted the rise of someone like Donald Trump as well as the political chaos and stripping away of institutional authority that we’ve lived through since. Did you think your prediction would come true so quickly?

Angelo Codevilla: I didn’t predict anything. I described a situation which had already come into existence. Namely, that the United States has developed a ruling class that sees itself as distinct from the raw masses of the rest of America. That the distinction that they saw, and which had come to exist, between these classes, comprised tastes and habits as well as ideas. Above all, that it had to do with the relative attachment, or lack thereof, of each of these classes to government.

One of the things that struck me about your original piece was your portrait of the American elite as a single class that seamlessly spans both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Of course, yes. Not in exactly the same way, though; what I said was that the Democrats were the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners.

The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society.

The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.

As a young person moving through American elite institutions, I was always struck by the marginal status of those other people you mention, Republicans. Clearly, they were not as bright as me and my friends were, which is why they were marginal, even if they had an easier path to some kind of dubious status as pseudo-intellectuals in their second- or third-rate party organs. That hardly mattered, though. The New York Times was the important newspaper, and it was a liberal newspaper. The New Yorker was an important magazine, and so it was a liberal magazine. Right-wing types might look instead to the Conservative Review of Books, published out of Mobile, Alabama, or the Jesuit review of something or another. But nobody was quaking in their boots about how such places might review your work. All the cultural capital was on the Democratic side of the ledger.

What a marvelous recitation of ruling class prejudice.

Of course, you would not have judged them to be nearly as intelligent as you folks were. And you probably didn’t imagine that others would think you less intelligent.

Let them rant and rave about their conspiracy theories and whatnot. They didn’t matter.

Well, they didn’t matter. Because of the power that you wielded, because of the institutions that you controlled.

Now let me give you an alternative. In France, with which you tell me you are acquainted, you have meritocracy in government and institutions. Meritocracy ensured by competitive exams. I, and a bunch of nonliberal democrats as myself, would be absolutely delighted if institutions like TheNew York Times, The Atlantic, were to open their pages to people who bested others in competitive exams. But of course, they’re not thinking at all of doing that. As a matter of fact, the institutions of liberal America have been moving away from competitive exams as fast as they know how.

In living memory, and I’m an example of that, it was for a time possible for nonliberal Democrats to get into the American foreign service, and if they did as I did, and scored number one in their class, they would have their choice of assignments. But now, you have all sorts of new criteria for admission into the foreign service, which have supposedly ensured greater diversity. In fact, what they had done was to eliminate the possibility that the joint might be invaded by lesser beings of superior intelligence.

There is a curious mélange of dispensations under which people are escorted into the grand ballroom of the good and the great, right? Category one were with high test scores. Then there were the children of people who had gone to these institutions in previous generations, whose parents have money and might be named Cabot or Lowell. Then there were the admissions categories that cover you in the opposite direction—4.8% African Americans plus at least one white person who grew up without shoes in the mountains of West Virginia. These covering cases were useful because they could be trumpeted as proof of how far and wide the net was cast. All of which went to show that the most meritorious people were all gathered together in this place, and were therefore fit to rule everyone else.

Merit as defined by what?

I have no idea.

Merit as defined by the capacity to be attractive to those at the top of the heap. In other words what you have is rightly called not meritocracy, but co-option.

Now it is one of the fundamental truths of our co-option that it results in a negative selection of elites. That each group selects people who are just a smacking below themselves, so that generation after generation, the quality of those at the top deteriorates.

Are you suggesting that the all-white Christian male elites, who largely inherited their status from their parents, were more deserving of their elevated status than their more diverse counterparts, like the people who ran American foreign policy under President Barack Obama?

I don’t know that the statesmen of the 1920s and ’30s were any more meritorious than the folks under Barack Obama, because they themselves were not selected by any meritocratic criteria, as you suggest. However, I do know, having taught college for many years, that the amount of work that was done by college students 50 years ago or more was considerably greater than the amount of work that is done by college graduates today.

As a graduate of two elite American universities, I am entirely willing to grant that point.

Them that don’t work so much don’t learn so much, usually.

There is something funny to me about your description of these people as the “elite” or a “ruling class,” though. I picture grand country homes like in the Masterpiece Theatre production of Brideshead Revisited. But if you look at your American elite, you find earnest bureaucratic types living in collegiate apartments with Ikea furniture.

No. Not Ikea furniture.

You’re talking about a class of people who are academics or lawyer-bureaucrats living on federal government and NGO salaries.

They have far more money than people who don’t have similar government attachments. The fact is that proximity to government power has meant, and does mean, more money and greater possibility.

I think about the tech oligarchs who park their multibillion-dollar fortunes offshore.

I would dispute that.

Really? How many tens of billions of dollars has Apple parked offshore? How much money do Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and Mark Zuckerberg pay in taxes?

Apple and Bill Gates have secured their money, not so much by relocating, but by having become the biggest lobbyists in the country. That is the source of their financial security.

The point of the ruling class is precisely the confusion of public and private power. This is, in fact, this is becoming in fact a corporate state. Which by the way was pioneered by one of my former countrymen by the name of Benito.

So, when you’re talking about the ruling class, you’re positing a continuum between the Silicon Valley oligarchs with their hundred-billion-dollar fortunes and these public employee and NGO types.

I am indeed. That is the meaning of the word party. The Democratic Party is in fact composed of the very people that you are talking about.

Parties are by nature coalitions, each part of which benefits from the other. But they share certain things in common. One of them is contempt for Americans who are outside of their ranks.

You call those contemptible people the “country party.”

Precisely. Here, I’m borrowing an 18th-century British term.

I thought it was a good term because it brings to mind country music.

That too. Have you ever been to Branson, Missouri? Do you even know what it is?

I gather it’s neither Aspen nor Hollywood.

Branson, Missouri, is an entertainment center, larger in every way than Hollywood. It is located in Branson, Missouri, in the Ozarks. It is one of the homes of country music stars and starlets. It’s a huge complex of every kind of family entertainment, from bass fishing to theater, music, museums, anything you can imagine. Now the fact that you have never heard of it typifies the limitations of the ruling class.

My oligarchical snobbery.

No, no, no. You haven’t even risen to that.

I’m a piker. I bet $5 on the trifecta at the dog track.

It typifies the limitations of the ruling class mind, not even to understand that over which you are lording it.

So, what role do the poor and disadvantaged people of America play in your scheme? As I’m sure you understand, the reason we members of the elite class accumulate so much money and power is to be good allies for those who are less fortunate than we are. At least that’s what they teach my children in these schools that cost $35,000 a year.

You certainly do teach them that. It is a youthful pretense. It is a pretense to which the Roman patricians did not stoop.

But eventually they did, right? Constantine got them. The nobles all made public displays of their Christian charity.

No, no, go back. The Roman patricians call these unfortunates clients. Their relationship with their clients is precisely your relationship with the unfortunate and the poor. They are your pawns, the people whose votes you take.

So, when I express my sincere concern about transgender rights, you would presumably accuse me of manufacturing a new category of clients—and at the same time, a new class of bigots for me to self-righteously oppose.

You are not manufacturing a class, or rather you are exploiting that class’ weakness to turn that class into clients.

Most of all, what you are giving them—which really in a sense they crave more than anything else—is a sense of grievance against the rest of America. Grievance is the handle by which you push these pawns into your cultural wars.

What an ungenerous way to describe my noble instinct to help the less fortunate. Do the less fortunate truly have nothing to be aggrieved about, here in America?

Whatever they have to be aggrieved about, that grievance serves your instrumental purpose. Their grievance is your happiness. If they didn’t have a grievance, you’d try to manufacture it. Their having a grievance is an occasion for you to, to sharpen it, to scratch it, and to make it more relevant to them than it otherwise would be.

So, what exactly does the authority of the beneficent class I am supposedly part of, and which you seem to abhor, rest upon? There is the inherent rightness of my views, of course, which is proven by science—

Well, no. It is founded upon your will to power.

But look at all the wonderful benefits we elitists have to offer, like Davos in the wintertime. Why shiver out in the cold, Angelo?

Let me crib my response to you. Verily, verily I say unto thee, they have their reward. Do people in your class know where that comes from?

I’m a Jew, so I get a mulligan on quotations from the New Testament.

I read the first part of the Bible as well as the second, so you ought to read the second as well as the first.

So people have insisted to the Jews throughout our history.

Now tell me: How does your eccentric description of the American elites square with what we know to be the American democratic system? Congress makes the laws. The president of the United States is in charge of the executive functions of government. And then there’s the Supreme Court, which makes sure everything’s constitutionally kosher.

What you are describing is a kind of semiconspiratorial extraconstitutional elite superstructure whose actions do not accord with American civics textbooks or what I read in the newspaper.

Thank you! Right over the plate.

You are describing, and the textbooks describe, what used to be the American system of government, which has not existed since the late 1930s. The last attempt to revive that system, to make it rise up out of the overlay of administrative agencies that the New Deal built, was the Supreme Court of Schechter Poultry vs. the United States, 1935, the essence of which decision was to say that a legislative power cannot be delegated. Were that maxim to be enforced, the FAA, the FCC, and on and on, all of these agencies would cease to exist because they are, quite literally, unconstitutional. Now the Supreme Court has held them to be constitutional under the fiction that they are in fact merely filling in the interstices of laws. However, your average law passed by Congress these days consists almost exclusively of grants to these agencies to do whatever it is they wish.

Which is why, when Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare that we would only know what it contained after it was passed, she was entirely correct. She was describing the way the American government works, which is in fact, to use your words, a vast conspiracy between the best lawyers on the outside and the best lawyers on the inside of government. They call each other, both on the inside and the outside, stakeholders. And the rest of us are what, scumbags?

Deplorables.

Deplorables, yes. But we’re not stakeholders, we who are neither regulators nor regulated entities, but rather ordinary people. We are not parties to this covenant.

There’s a lecture given by James Wilson, the signer of the Declaration of Independence and the head of the first American law school, about the difference between American law and law everywhere else in the Western world. Elsewhere, law came from power. In America, positive law will be valid only if it was in accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s god.

But that’s not the basis of the revolt of the deplorables, or the country party, as you call it.

The basis of the revolt is simple. We realize that you hate us and therefore we hate you back. And we will take anybody, not that we found this man who fits our description, because Donald Trump didn’t fit anybody’s description of what they wanted. But we will take anybody who’ll take a swing at you.

Which is why I originally wrote at the back of that essay, that this revolution would be for the better or the worse. Because of the urgency that the country class felt. For getting out of all of this.

You seem to have had a marvelous life, though.

Fraught with all manner of difficulties. I had several job offers just as I was finishing my comps, and then I got drafted. By the time I came out of the service, there were no jobs to be had. And so first I worked at a jerkwater college in Pennsylvania. Too awful for words, I got out of there, but I couldn’t find anything else. So I did the only thing that I could do, which is to pass exams. I got into the foreign service. And then from there to the Hill and then to Stanford to the Hoover Institution and then to Boston. While I was on the Hill, I also taught ancient and modern political thought in Georgetown.

I probably would have done better for myself and my family if I stayed in the foreign service. Or, in the depths of my depression I got admitted to Berkeley Law school. But hey, you’re right. I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

You got to write. You got to think. You got to see the kinds of things that were going to feed your writing.

I got to teach a lot of students, several of them are teaching right now. And they’re doing good work. Books, we’ll see. I don’t think I’m going to write another book because the last one I wrote, hell of a good book, didn’t sell very much. But who knows. If I get some time off of the vineyard here, and I don’t get too many irrigation systems going wrong or things like that, I’ll write some more.

Read the full interview in Tablet.