Who Is Adriana Ross?

The odd thing about the four women named in Epstein's 2008 non prosecution agreement is how unproductive it is to try to figure out what, if anything, they actually did all day. Adriana Ross is the best example. Just as the Maxwell trial began, the UK Mirror hyped,

A former model accused of organising under-age girls for Jeffrey Epstein to abuse has left the US as the FBI is poised to make arrests.

Adriana Ross, 36, who was once questioned about Prince Andrew under oath, was tracked down by the Mirror as she left her home in Miami, Florida.

As she packed a case into a car she refused to answer questions about Andrew or her alleged role with Epstein.

And when she later arrived at the city’s cruise terminal with her husband, she insisted: “I have nothing to say.”

. . . On Friday night sources told the Mirror that papers were being prepared ahead of “several arrests”.

But Ms Ross is now on a cruise of all things, where the FBI could pull her off the ship at will, and there still have been no arrests. Where have you gone, J Edgar? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. The Mirror story goes on,

She was accused of clearing three computers from Epstein’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2005 before police raided it – but when asked about this she exercised her right to remain silent.

During a civil prosecution in March 2010, she refused to answer questions about Prince Andrew, whose friendship with Epstein has led to public shame.

. . . Lawyers for Epstein’s victims also tackled Ross on notes found in the billionaire’s bin purportedly showing Ross allegedly arranging when and how victims would visit him.

One read: “Adriana hasn’t confirmed Julie for 11 yet, she is keeping Brittany on hold in case Julie doesn’t call back.”

Web searches bring up slightly more background. Elsewhere according to the UK Mirror,

Polish-born [Adriana] Ross moved to the US in 2002 and was once on the books of the prestigious Elite model agency.

She wed her first husband in Miami and worked for Epstein for a number of years until his first arrest in 2007.

Since leaving his employment, Ross has qualified as an accountant and lives with second husband, Ariel Salazar, in a run-down £217,000 home.

Ross and fellow alleged “potential co-conspirators” Sarah Kellen, Lesley Groff and Nadia Marcinkova could still be subject to criminal charges in New York.

According to the Daily Beast,

Court filings reveal that an alleged co-conspirator referred to as Employee-1 will tell jurors that in 2005, Epstein’s staff continued to enable his sex crimes and that she made phone calls to schedule his underage “massage” appointments.

The unnamed employee appears to be Adriana Ross, a 38-year-old former model from Poland who was among four women to receive immunity as part of Epstein’s controversial 2008 plea agreement in Florida. . . . According to prosecutors, Employee-1 will testify that in October 2005, Epstein and her superior, another co-conspirator identified as Employee-2, instructed her to help remove computers from the money manager’s Palm Beach mansion.

However, the prosecution in the Maxwell trial has rested its oddly abreviated case without calling Ross or mentioning the 2005 episode. The story continues,

In a 2010 deposition, former butler Janusz Banasiak said Ross and a male associate hauled computers out of Epstein’s lair weeks prior to Palm Beach cops executing a search warrant. Ross, whose deposition was taken a month after Banasiak’s, invoked her Fifth Amendment rights when answering questions posed by victims’ lawyers. Those queries included: “Isn’t it true that Ghislaine Maxwell delivers underage minor females to Jeffrey Epstein?” and “How much additional money or bonus were you paid to take the computers that we’re talking about out of Jeffrey Epstein’s house?”

Attorneys also asked Ross if Maxwell discussed retaliating against girls who went to the police, and whether Maxwell and Epstein had ever threatened her. One lawyer asked whether Maxwell told Ross: “Don’t worry. If we get caught we have it covered and we’ll just attack these little girls.” The ex-model replied, “I refuse to answer.”

Since coming to America in 2002 on a visa sponsored by a modeling agency, Ross has used the surnames Mucinska and Salazar.

But that's the sum total. Ross worked for Epstein from some time after her arrival in the US at age 18 until about the time of Epstein's 2006 Florida arrest, which isn't all that long, especially in comparison to the others mentioned in the non prosecution agreement. There is no evidence of a romantic relationship with Epstein; she was already too old. During that time, she apparently set up a tentative visit by someone named Julie in case Brittany couldn't make it. We might assume the visit was to Epstein for a massage and that Brittany and Julie were underage, but we certainly don't know, and nothing of this is in evidence in the Maxwell trial.

And in any case, Ms Ross is exercising her right to remain silent. At best, it looks like Adriana Ross was a low-level scheduler who was paid to look good and hand out hundred-dollar bills to nymphets. The photo above suggests she wan't terribly bright. At one point, she helped a tech guy wheel out some computers. The other week, she went on a cruise with her husband.

Is that all? What about the tech guy? Wouldn't he have known a lot more about the computers? Did they ever go looking for him?

Something's hinky here. There's some sleight of hand going on, and the press, insofar as it's paying attention, is complicit.

Who Is Lesley Groff?

Lesley Groff is a more shadowy figure among the Epsein assistants named in the 2008 non prosecution agreement. Every indication is that, with an affluent and apparenty influential husband, she has been able to lawyer up and take advantage of the legal protections built around the Epstein enterprise followindg his arrests. She began working for him as an adult and does not appear to have been groomed or brought into his circle as a sex slave. Unlike many other Epstein associates, there's no indication she ever had a romantic relationiship with him. According to the Daily Beast,

Lesley Groff was another Epstein assistant who allegedly coordinated travel for young girls, often calling to schedule “massages.” Though not directly named in Monday’s [2019 Epstein] indictment, the 51-year-old has been previously named as one of Epstein’s three female assistants. According to a 2005 Chicago Tribune story about executive-assistant pay, Epstein divulged his assistants made about $200,000.

Groff's compensation went beyond that:

The accused trafficker told the business reporter that he bought Groff a Mercedes-Benz E320 to make her commuting easier after she had a child, and he paid for a full-time nanny so that she could keep working for him. “There is no way that I could lose Lesley to motherhood,” Epstein told the Times.

According to this source,

In a separate 2017 lawsuit, filed by an anonymous Jane Doe, it was claimed that Groff was part of a circle of female 'recruiters' close to Epstein.

'Groff coordinated schedules between Epstein and the various young females used for sex; made travel arrangements for the girls; tended to their living needs; and communicated with them in order to maintain their compliance with the rules of behavior imposed upon them by the enterprise,' the lawsuit said.

Groff's attorney Michael Bachner has denied the claims, saying: 'As an executive assistant to Epstein, Lesley worked as part of a professional staff that included in-house attorneys, accountants, an office manager and other office staff.

'Lesley's job included making appointments for Mr. Epstein as directed by him, taking his messages, and setting up high-level meetings with CEOs, business executives, scientists, politicians and celebrities.

'At no time during Lesley's employment with Epstein did she ever engage in any misconduct.'

This site says Groff, "now lives with her husband in a Connecticut town populated by hedge fund owners [New Canaan]".

. . . her spokesman said she was an executive secretary for the billionaire sex offender.

“After Epstein’s arrest, his attorneys set up a company (DKI LLC) to pay salaries and other overhead. Lesley considered herself to be an employee of Epstein until she resigned in 2019 but was simply being paid by the company set up by Indyke at Epstein’s direction or knowledge,” the spokesman added.

. . . Lesley Groff’s husband, Ike Groff, is a former hedge fund founder and works in real estate. It seems she has gone on and lived her life since the Epstein allegations emerged in Florida 2005. As many have.

Lesley Groff came into Jeffrey Epstein’s world in the late 90s as a personal assistant.

The Epstein victim's compensation fund has provided her legal cover as well.

Lesley Groff said Tuesday that the withdrawal of a Manhattan Supreme Court suit filed by Jennifer Araoz cleared her name.

“This is a true vindication for our client Lesley Groff who had no knowledge and no participation in any of these horrific crimes,” said Groff’s attorney Jon Whitcomb. “But as a wife and a mother, Lesley remains heartbroken for Jennifer and all of the victims.”

Araoz accused Epstein of abusing her at his E. 71st St. mansion in 2001 and 2002. The first time Araoz visited the perv’s $77 million townhouse as a freshman in high school, she waited to meet Epstein in Groff’s office, according to her suit. Her abusive “massages” of Epstein, which began when she was 14 years old, were often arranged by Groff, she claimed.

Araoz filed a claim in the out-of-court Epstein Victims Compensation Program. She accepted a settlement from the program, which required she withdraw her claims.

“Participation in the Victims’ Compensation Program requires permanent discontinuance of all legal actions against former employees of Jeffrey Epstein, including Ms. Groff,” Araoz attorney Eric Lerner said. “My client maintains the truth and veracity of all of the allegations in her pleadings.”

The overall puzzle for me with Groff is that she and her husband appear to be, at least on the surface, sophisticated and respectable people. Groff worked for Epstein at a high level for at least 20 years, by these accounts, and although she was well paid, it must have been very clear to her that hinky stuff was going on -- as best anyone can tell, Epstein's fortune was built on Ponzi schemes, embezzlement,and blackmail. The other assistants were more like upscale bimbos; Groff isn't in that league. What did she know?

Who Is Nadia Marcinkova?

According to Wikipedia,

Nadia Marcinko, also known as Nada Marcinkova (Slovak: Naďa Marcinková) (born 1986), is a Slovakian-born pilot, flight instructor, and the CEO of Aviloop, an aviation website. She is known for her association with financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as well as Ghislaine Maxwell.

. . . Over the years, several news outlets have reported that Marcinko, previously known under the name of Nada Marcinkova, worked as a long-term assistant to Jeffrey Epstein and was a regular pilot of Epstein's so-called Lolita Express. It was reported that she was one of four of Epstein's accomplices (including Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, and Lesley Groff) that were given immunity from prosecution in Epstein's controversial non-prosecution agreement from 2008. The Guardian reported that Marcinkova was questioned in 2010 concerning Epstein, who was convicted of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution

. . . According to the Miami Herald, Marcinko visited Epstein "more than 70 times when he was in Palm Beach custody," after his first criminal conviction.

In 2019, in written testimony given by Epstein's underage victims, Marcinko is also described as having encouraged and engaged in sexual acts with the underaged girls, sometimes involving sex toys, at the suggestion of Epstein. In one account, according to police, Epstein told one victim Marcinkova was his "sex slave", and that Epstein had "purchased her" when she was 15 from her family in the former Yugoslavia, a claim journalist Philip Weiss had made in New York Magazine in 2007.

However, Marcinkova/Marcinko is from Slovakia, not the former Yugoslavia, and her father denies selling her to Epstein. Whatever the circumstance, as with other of his associates, she seems to have transitioned from being an underage victim to an adult protegee whom Epstein sponsored by furthering her education and professional development, and she transitioned from victim to adult enabler and coconspirator. Also at the link,

Marcinko started flight training at a flight school at the Palm Beach County Florida Airport, and with 250 hours in her logbook, she accepted an offer from Jeffrey Epstein to obtain her Gulfstream II rating and was certified shortly thereafter.

Like Sarah Kellen, she has continued in an Epstein-related business after her direct association with Epstein ended, but the extent to which the business is actually profitable is highly uncertain.

Marcinko became popular on social media, under her label "Gulfstream Girl". Gulfstream Aerospace filed a trademark infringement suit (Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation v. Aviloop LLC et al.) against her on November 18, 2013. Marcinko and Gulfstream reached an out-of-court settlement, filed on January 6, 2014, after which Marcinko changed her online name to "Global Girl".

As of 2019, she remained CEO of her aviation business, Aviloop, described by Wired as a "supremely odd aviation branding business, whose website features flawless shots of her with Gulfstreams." The business is based at an address in New York, that is in a property controlled by Mark Epstein, brother of Jeffrey Epstein.

Like Sarah Kellen, her business is or was conducted out of an Epstein-related property and represents a continuation of a business role she performed with Epstein, in her case as a pilot. However, the business itself, as with Kellen, doesn't seem compatible with a high-profile lifestyle, and this raises for me the question of whether Epstein, in addition to securing a non prosecution agreement on their behalf, also provided them with a nest egg that could serve as an inducement not to testify against him or other associates in future legal cases.

Although Marcinkova was one of Epstein's pilots, and her flight logs were among those subpoenaed by the US Virgin Islands, she was not called to testify in Ghislaine Maxwell's trial. That link also points out that in 2009, another Epstein pilot,

David Rodgers provided logs that revealed that Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey and Naomi Campbell were on board Epstein’s “Lolita Express” jet[.]

The only Epstein pilot called to testify in the Maxwell trial was Larry Visoski, who claimed he never saw any inappropriate activity on the plane. This raises the question of why neither Marcinkova nor Rodgers was called as a witness if Visoski's testimony was of so little value. But according to CNN, at Maxwell's trial,

Visoski testified that Epstein paid for his two daughters' education through college and gifted him acreage at the New Mexico ranch where Visoski built himself a home. The pilot noted that it was Epstein's practice to pay for the schooling of all his employees' children because he valued higher education. He also acknowledged signing a non-disclosure agreement as a part of his employment.

Two college educations in this day and age come to nearly half a million, far more than generous for an employee benefit. It sounds more like hush money. And neither Sarah Kellen nor Marcinkova had children, so we might suspect some other emolument of equivalent value was paid to them. In general, Epstein seems to have had a remarkable ability to spot weaknesses in his marks, victims, and enablers and keep manipuating them for decades with some combination of money, guilty conscience, loyalty, and obligation.

Who Is Sarah Kellen?

Intrigued by the list of Epstein's co-conspirators on page 5 of his 2008 non prosecution agreement, I decided to look them up. The most prominent, whose name came up Thursday in the Maxwell trial, is Sarah Kellen. It appears that there's no good single source on her. The Cut says she is sometimes known as Sarah Kensington.

Kellen kept all of the names and numbers of girls who gave Epstein erotic massages and would call around to see who was available to “work” when Epstein was at his Palm Beach mansion. Some of these girls later told Palm Beach detectives that it was Kellen who would show them upstairs when they arrived at the house and set up the massage table for them.

One of Epstein’s victims, Sarah Ransome, said that Maxwell and Kellen coached her on how to pleasure him. “It was Ghislaine and Sarah Kellen that showed me how to please Jeffrey,” Ransome said.

According to the New York Post,

Kellen was Epstein’s personal assistant for at least 10 years and has been named in lawsuits as the “lieutenant” and second in command for the moneyman’s accused madam, Maxwell, who is currently facing serious sex crimes charges.

According to the lawsuits, she allegedly kept lists of young women to recruit as “massage therapists” for her boss, booked travel for them and even took them to his room where they were abused.

According to The Daily Beast,

Sarah Kellen, Epstein’s former assistant who allegedly kept a Rolodex of young girls to recruit for her employer, is now married to NASCAR driver Brian Vickers. Along with traveling with her husband, the 39-year-old (who also goes by the name Sarah Kensington) is the owner of an interior-design firm, SLK Designs.

“Sarah Kensington makes a living doing what she loves in life, interior design,” a Facebook page connected to SLK Designs states. “She is the owner of SLK Designs LLC. and has studies at several schools including the University of Hawaii and New York School of Interior Design.”

. . . Although online mentions of it are scarce, records show the business once operated from a building in midtown Manhattan owned by Epstein’s brother. Also, per the Daily Beast, “The condominium listed to take SLK Designs deliveries, at 301 E. 66th St., is the same address where Epstein allegedly rented units to house models.”

. . . The page also notes that Sarah “is working with a number of clients on various projects including renovating several corporate apartments in New York, the Caribbean, and Paris. For the houses that Sarah manages, she does a number of duties which can involve organizing staff schedules, looking for and interviewing housekeepers and chefs, purchase and source items that are needed for the household (flatware, dishes, furniture, art, etc.), design floral arrangements, and interior design.”

Those duties seem pretty much the same as what Ghislaine Maxwell also did for Epstein, general household administrator, but now just without the nymphets. The story continues,

In 2013, Kellen married NASCAR driver Brian Vickers.

According to the New York Post,

Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged “sex slave” recruiter Sarah Kellen and her NASCAR-driver husband Brian Vickers have caused misery at celebrity condominium in SoHo, according to neighbors who complain of their endless apartment renovation.

The couple lives in the three-bedroom, $10-million penthouse of the Mercer Greene building, where Vickers is president of the condo board.

. . . Residents also complain about the disturbance caused by Vickers’ and Kellen’s own projects. “They’ve also done their own renovations over the last five years,” despite spending much of the time elsewhere, said one condo owner. “It’s the other homeowners that have to put up with it.”

Vickers and his firm Requiro Terra LLC are currently facing a lawsuit filed by Midhattan Woodworking Corp., who claim they completed work on the penthouse’s interior in 2016 costing $668,201, and are still owed $64,921.01. The work included a “shoe pullout wardrobe cabinet” and teak adornments to the shower door. Vickers didn’t respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

However, Kellen complains that she is actually among Epstein's victims. The Maxwell trial has brought out Epstein's patterns of grooming underage victims in part by paying for their education, which also appears to be reflected in the careers of former associates like Melanie Walker, but at the same time, Epstein also provided apartments to other key women in his entourage. In Kellen's case, he seems to have set her up in business as well.

Questions remain. How was Epstein able to negotiate a non prosecution agreement for Kellen and an unknown number of others in her position? How much of a nest egg did he provide for her? How was that pricey condo, with its associated lifestyle, funded? But maybe most important, Kellen seems to have been just as culpable in trafficking underage teens as Ghislaine Maxwell, but so far, she's avoided any accountability, even to the extent of not having to testify against Maxwell. Why wasn't she even a witness in this trial? What might the defense have brought out in cross examination, for instance?

"Is That It?"

So much is happening, but there's so little news. That applies to the Ghislaine Maxwell trial as much as anything else. In a surprise move yesterday, the prosecution rested its case after less than two weeks, when at the start, the trial was predicted to last as long as six weeks.

From the very limited informed commentary I've seen, the consensus appears to be that this is a show trial that's meant to punish Jeffrey Epstein post mortem without, however, touching in any way the very prominent figures from Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Prince Andrew on down who may also have beeen implicated in Epstein's activites.

A mention by one of the YouTube commentators on the trial, Robert Gruler, of an episode in Thursday's abbreviated session brings this out. The prosecution called a witness, Tracy Chapell of FedEx, to testify about packages Epstein sent to victims during 2002. During cross-examination, Maxwell's counsel asked the witness to note the signature on the FedEx invoice, an "S.Kellen".

Gruler points out that this is Sarah Kellen, one of the named Epstein co-conspirators listed on the 2007 non prosecution agreement with Epstein, in which the US Justice Department "agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein", including Ms Kellen (p 5). At that point, the judge called an early end to the trial session for the day due to the illness of an attorney.

Gruler doesn't say much about what potential use Maxwell's lawyers may make of this information, but it raises the obvious question: there are people who could be on trial now, but they aren't, because the US Justice Department agreed not to prosecute them. The agreement lists three others specifically in addition to Kellen, but others are covered in the agreement who aren't listed. What on earth is up with that?

In addition, the agreemernt is with Alexander Acosta, then US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, but reports are that it was reviewed and approved by main Justice at a "high level", and Acosta later said he offered a lenient plea deal because "he was told that Epstein 'belonged to intelligence', was 'above his pay grade,' and to 'leave it alone'". The link continues, "The fact that the agreement with Epstein also protected unnamed 'potential co-conspirators' from federal prosecution drew speculation that perhaps the deal was intended to protect influential people in Epstein's orbit".

A Vanity Fair piece by Gabriel Sherman sums up the issues:

In seeking to put the disgraced British heiress behind bars for a possible 80 years, prosecutors are aiming to redress serial failures by the justice system to punish the crimes of her partner: the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Which is why it’s shocking—and tragic—that the prosecution’s case against Maxwell appears far weaker than many people expected.

. . . On Tuesday, the third accuser testified that Epstein sexually abused her more than a hundred times starting when she was a 14-year-old. The woman, identified by her first name Carolyn, recounted that Maxwell often scheduled her massages with Epstein and once groped her while she was naked and said she had “a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends.”

. . . Unfortunately, prosecutors didn’t follow up and ask Carolyn to name Epstein’s friends. Carolyn’s gut-wrenching testimony was also undermined by a seeming lack of preparation by the prosecution. Under cross-examination, one of Maxwell’s lawyers, Jeffrey Pagliuca, exposed inconsistencies in Carolyn’s prior comments on the case. Pagliuca noted that Carolyn didn’t mention Maxwell’s name once during her first interview with the FBI in 2007. Neither did Carolyn include Maxwell’s name in subsequent lawsuits she filed against Epstein and alleged coconspirator Sarah Kellen.

. . . The weakest plank in the prosecution’s case, however, has been the lack of testimony from Epstein’s innermost circle. Prosecutors haven’t called Epstein’s highest-profile accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, to the stand, even though her name has been mentioned numerous times by other witnesses. Meanwhile, Epstein’s controversial 2007 nonprosecution agreement listed four alleged coconspirators: Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff, and Nadia Marcinkova (Notably, Maxwell’s name wasn’t included). These women conceivably could testify about Maxwell’s role in the alleged sex trafficking operation. Why didn’t the government gain their cooperation against Maxwell?

It looks for now as if the prosecution's aim has been to convict Maxwell on the narrowest possible grounds while keeping any connection between Epstein and any high-level figures off the agenda. But this answers no questions while raising other new ones. All I can conclude for now is that this hasn't been a good year for the lizard people, and likely this will continue.

The Morning After Continues Apace

The recent history of moral panics shows that they sooner or later work themselves out through the legal system. The McMartin preschool case, the most visible episode of the 1980s Satanic day care panic, lasted seven years but resulted in no convictions, and all charges were dropped in 1990. The putative 2019 MAGA attack on Jussie Smollett took place before the 2020 COVID-BLM panic, but it was nevertheless a background issue throughout 2020 as public and law enforcement outcry over the case's being dropped eventualy resulted in appointment of a special prosecutor.

In addition, the most vocal opjection to the anticipated outcome of Smollett's trial came from Black Lives Matter, one of the chief entrepreneurs of the 2020 panic:

In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.

. . . Black Lives Matter will continue to work towards the abolition of police and every unjust system. We will continue to love and protect one another, and wrap our arms around those who do the work to usher in Black freedom and, by extension, freedom for everyone else.

In comparison with the McMartin case, the Smollett case was resolved quickly, although the McMartin allegations of bad clowns in secret underground rooms were no more credible than Smollett's story. The puzzling thing about Smollett's story, though is that it was never credible, with the putative MAGA assailants forced to wait for hours in subzero cold for Smollett, delayed by a late flight arrival, to appear.

The most cogent commentary on the case came in the banter on Greg Gutfeld's show last night, where guests noted that not only was Smollett a bad actor, but he was a bad director (the choreographed attack took place with the camera facing in the wrong direction) and a bad casting agent (he hired black actors with heavy African accents to play white rednecks).

Not only that, but if Smollett intended the episode somehow to result in urban riots a la Rodney King or George Floyd, such riots would be highly unlikely in the middle of winter. Why didn't he just wait a few months? I don't think it's unreasonable to think that, although there seems to have been a great deal of planning behind the episode, the planning was very bad, quite possibly under the influence of drugs.

Another question is why he allowed this to go to trial, and once he did, why he took the stand. The consensus seems to be that if he wanted to continue a Hollywood career -- though he was getting too old to continue to play young gay black actor-musicians in any case -- it would have been in his interest to negotiate a quiet plea and stay away from publicity. Instead, he bizarrely doubled down.

(The same question comes up with Alec Baldwin. That man's judgment appears to be equally compromised. Our pastor refers to an "epidemic of narcissism", but it's quite possibly exacerbated by drug use as well.)

Another question is that if he'd negotiated a quiet plea, it would have been far less expensive than going to trial. And now that he's convicted, he intends to appeal, which is another way of saying he's committed to spending millions of dollars on attorneys over a period of years, when the likelihood appears to be that he'll spend minimal jail time for his conviction, while the financial penalty for his legal hot water steadily rises nonetheless. And that's under his complete control.

I can't imagine that his family has the resources to cover this -- I don't want even to try to estimate what he's paid multiple attorneys up to now. At this point, with no income, all I can think is he simply assumes someone's going to cover the bill for his lawyers and his drug-addled lifestyle indefinitely.

Greg Gutfeld, who certainly understands the entertainment industry better than I do, thinks the powers that be will nevertheless set him up with a "Jussie is back" show. By then, in his early to mid 40s and the effects of drugs even more visible, it's hard to imagine what that would look like.

You can push fantasies into real life only so far. The American people are smarter than the moral entrepreneurs have been making out.

More Big Think From David Brooks

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is one of those books that, like Coming of Age in Samoa, if elite-school liberal arts majors weren't assigned them as sophomores (I was), they at least knew about them. By the time I graduated, I thought of Burke as something of a dilettante, and my opinion didn't change much after I was assigned A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in grad school. At minimum, founding one's world view on Burke strikes me as building a house on sand, even if it was the thing to do among certain conservatives of the past century.

But this is David Brooks. Two years ago but 50 years late, he discovered the Me Decade for himself in The Second Mountain, and last year in The Atlantic he declared the nuclear family a mistake. Somewhere I have some old books by Alan Watts I can send him. But now, of all things, amid the "devastation" of contemporary society that he apparently celebrates, he's rediscovered Edmund Burke. Whew. I need a moment.

Somehow, Brooks has become The Atlantic's big thinker, its current version of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that's not far off -- The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, who funds her eleemosynary efforts through something called the Emerson Collective. I remember one of my officemates as a graduate assistant, a committed Marxist, who had the insight that Emerson was something of a Dr Feelgood for Gilded Age capitalism, and he was right. David Brooks is his intellectual heir, maybe in the same way John John Kennedy was the heir of Joe. But although Mrs Jobs is said not to take a day to day role in managing The Atlantic, we must assume she finds Brooks's current prominence there at least something to tolerate, and I would guess the other lizard people pretty much agree.

In any case, having declared the nuclear family a big mistake last year, this year Brooks declares true conservatism dead on the somewhat flimsy authority of Edmund Burke, or at least his reading of Burke, or maybe his memory of his reading of Burke, or something like that.

Human society is unalterably complex, Edmund Burke argued. If you try to reengineer it based on the simplistic schema of your own reason, you will unintentionally cause significant harm. Though Burke was writing as a conservative statesman in Britain some 200 years earlier, the wisdom of his insight was apparent in what I was seeing in the Chicago of the 1980s.

. . . What passes for “conservatism” now, however, is nearly the opposite of the Burkean conservatism I encountered then. Today, what passes for the worldview of “the right” is a set of resentful animosities, a partisan attachment to Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson, a sort of mental brutalism. The rich philosophical perspective that dazzled me then has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression.

. . . This essay is a reclamation project. It is an attempt to remember how modern conservatism started, what core wisdom it contains, and why that wisdom is still needed today.

. . . Our political categories emerged following the wars of religion of the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries. It was a time of bitterness, polarization, and culture war—like today, but a thousand times worse. The Reformation had divided Europe into hostile Catholic and Protestant camps. The wars were a series of massacres and counter-massacres, vicious retributions, and even more vicious counter-retributions.

Brooks's argument is that Trumpism has superseded a Burkean conservatism that emerged from the religious wars and the French Revolution. As he puts it,

[I]n at least one way, Trumpism is truly anti-conservative. Both Burkean conservatism and Lockean liberalism were trying to find ways to gentle the human condition, to help society settle differences without resort to authoritarianism and violence. Trumpism is pre-Enlightenment. Trumpian authoritarianism doesn’t renounce holy war; it embraces holy war, assumes it is permanent, in fact seeks to make it so.

. . . Conservatives thus spend a lot of time defending the “little platoon[s],” as Burke called them, the communities and settled villages that are the factories of moral and emotional formation. If, as Burke believed, reason alone cannot find the one true answer to any social problem, each community must improvise its own set of solutions to intricate human concerns. The conservative seeks to defend this wonderful heterogeneity from the forces of bigness and the centralizing arrogance of rationalism—to protect these little platoons when government tries to perform roles best done in families, when the federal government takes power from local government, when big corporations suck the vitality out of local economies.

But wait a moment. Didn't Brooks just last year declare that the nuclear family was a mistake? But here he's saying that families are little platoons that work things out, like Middle Earth against the Dark Lord Sauron. But if you probe Brooks, Middle Earth is just a big mistake anyhow, and all you're left with is the forces of bigness. Or was that just last year? I can see why Mrs Jobs likes this guy.

Here's where Brooks's Burkean-Middle Earth world view gets things basically wrong: the problem is that the US Republican Party isn't that kind of conservative. Its first presidential candidate was Abraham Lincoln, and his election on an anti-slavery platform was enough to start a war. How on earth did this "gentle the human condition"? The first two sentences of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address completely refute Brooks's theory:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Lincoln saw very clearly the need to settle differences over Enlightenment ideas with authoritarianism and violence. Years after Burke and the French Revolution. There are, to be sure, fringe libertarians and segregationist diehards who stil refer to the "monster Lincoln". If you take this to its conclusion, it sounds as if Brooks might be among them.

But sometimes even the little platoons need to fight. My view continues to be that Trump is a talented amateur who saw the sentiments of the little platoons and expressed them effectively. Brooks normally sneers at those platoons, summoning up characters like Patio Man or denouncing pro-Trump boat parades -- but what are those parades other than formations of little platoons?

Brooks is a paradigmatic example of how the elite universities are failing us.