Moral insanity

by liberal japonicus

This is the second post from this podcast by Hasan Minaj, with the transcript for the podcast linked here. Jacob Soboroff’s second book is Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster and he recounts a very strange anecdote that has been knocking around in my head.

Minaj pulls out these details from the book, and this story is that Soboroff is originally from the Palisades, which was ground zero for the LA wildfires. He and his family had moved away, but when the fires started, he immediately went there to report and this LATimes article talks about it.

He has a lot of interesting anecdotes and points, but the one that I can’t shake is this. The Palisades is next to Santa Monica, which is Stephen Miller’s hometown and while he is reporting on the fires, he gets contacted by Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s wife, asking him to check on the house of her in-laws, Stephen Miller’s parents, which is in the Palisades. Soboroff and Katie Miller were not in any way friends and in fact, Katie Miller was a flak for Homeland Security and after Soboroff’s reporting on family separation, they were on the outs. So Soboroff was pretty surprised that Katie Miller reached out to him.

He goes to the parent’s home and it has been destroyed and he let her know that. I’ll let Soboroff take it from here.

And like many friends of mine, she asked, can I go check on their house to see that I was the only person that she knew that was there? And she asked me to go look. And I did. And their house burned down and I let her know. And frankly, I felt awful for them and devastated and sad. And I thought, in a way, maybe this is going to be that olive branch that allows us to see these types of disasters and have a shared sense of humanity and to feel like we were in this together. But she had just been appointed to work for Elon Musk at Doge. And within, I think hours, both Donald Trump and Elon Musk were tweeting misinformation and disinformation about the fires. And it did the opposite of have a thawing effect with Katie. And in fact, in the long run, when it was an arsonist that was announced to have started the fire that became the Palisades fire, you know, she’s tweeting cheekily about, oh, I thought it was climate change. It didn’t do anything for all of us to see things in a common way.

They go on to talk about it more, but to me, this sounds like textbook sociopathy. The Manual of Mental Disorders lists it as Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), which is a “pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others” and this sounds exactly right, except for the fact that the anti- in antisocial has a hard time when you have whatever percentage you have who are willing to cheer Orange Douche on. Both Adorno and Bauman talked about the notion of negative ethics, where good and bad were swapped. When I read the anecdote of Katie Miller and it just seemed to be of a piece.

Seamus Healey wrote The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the end has often been quoted, but this story reminds me of the beginning:

Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.
People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they’re fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.