Thread by @nils_gilman

So it turns out that back in her college politics days at Florida, Katie Waldman, Mike Pence’s new press secretary (and allegedly mini-Goebbels new girlfriend) got into some ethical hot water. How that played out is pretty interesting. A thread: alligator.org/news/student_g…

The basic story is straightforward: Waldman in 2012 was campaigning for the Gators Student Senate with fellow Senator Jason Tiemeier, and was with him when he trashed several hundred copies of one of the student newspapers—presumably part of the hyperlocal Fake News complex.

Now, in some ways this is just low-end dirty trickery of the sort that’s typical, even banal, in the LARPing world of college Republican politics. But there’s a little more to this story than immediately meets the eye, having to do with Waldman’s public defense of her behavior.

When asked why she didn’t come forward about Tiemeier’s actions (which he and other members of their party originally denied) her defense was simple: “I didn’t do it. I counseled Jason not to do it. He agreed. I thought I acted very responsibly.”

What we see here is a particularly distilled first person account of what I suspect is a common sort of moral casuistry that people working in and for the 😡 regime use to come to terms what they are doing.

In a nutshell, the rationalization has two parts, the first being that, well, I told them not to do it, and the second being that I didn’t do any of the bad stuff myself. I was just hanging out, no biggie.

What’s completely absent here — the particular moral blindness at work — is any notion of how, simply by being present at the scene of the crime one becomes an accessory to it, and by not coming forward about it, a moral and operational enabler or it.

That one becomes an accessory to a crime simply by being present and aware of its commission is a legal commonplace: You get in the car with your crew to go do a drive-by, all y’all are going to get charged with attempted murder, not just the trigger man.

But instead of this elementary moral logic, Waldman applied a different (political) logic: I didn’t personally do anything wrong, I advised against it, he made his own choices, and whatever happens, I’m not snitching on my own team.

Here’s the broader point: the substitution of elementary moral sense for political-moral sense might be something of a job requirement (or at least more of a feature than a bug) for someone wishing to serve as the press secretary to our Very Evangelical 😡-enabling VPOTUS.

You can imagine why this sort of truncated moral sensibility would be very useful, maybe even necessary, for anyone thinking of serving as a flunky in this White House: sure, the boss is a crook, but *I counseled him not to do that, and he agreed.* Moral responsibility fulfilled!

Waldman is uninteresting in herself — and dating Stephen Miller is probably more punishment than even she deserves. But her little college kurfuffle serves as a useful window into the logic or moral and political rot at the heart of the GOP today.