We deserve better elites*

(*What they call themselves, anyway.) No one is perfect, everyone is human. But the people who want to rule us should - at a minimum - treat their jobs with respect and avoid rank hypocrisy.

Again, we’ve had a look at the hidden rot among our self-styled betters.

Again, it’s hard to escape the feeling they’re out for themselves and themselves alone.

Two separate, unrelated scandals involving government officials and journalists blew up late last week, both revealing astounding hypocrisy.

In New York City, Dr. Jay Varma, a top epidemiologist, admitted hosting sex parties during Covid - at a time when he had helped force 9 million people into lockdown.

In Washington, Olivia Nuzzi, a star political reporter known for her scathing writing, admitted a “personal relationship” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - at a time she was covering the 2024 presidential race.¹

But as infuriating as the behavior from Nuzzi and Varma is how other would-be elites rose to defend what they had done.

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(I’m not perfect. But I try my best to give you hard, honest coverage. Support it for less than 20 cents a day.)

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The Atlantic (why is it always The Atlantic?) produced this indelible take on Varma’s admission of having hotel sex parties with up to 10 friends even as New York shut playgrounds and tried to keep anyone from going to the beach:

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Yes, in the world of The Atlantic, parties where people rent a hotel room to take the illegal hallucinogen MDMA and have group sex are apparently “relatable.”

Who among us has not capped off a hard day’s work by joining a nearby orgy - the hotter and steamier the better?

In its defense of Varma, the magazine played down his hypocrisy and the lockdowns that he had pushed New York City to impose in 2020 and 2021. “It’s not clear whether Varma personally violated any COVID rules,” the article claimed.

After all, the sex parties included about “10 people” (oh, the permutations!), and the city had not explicitly barred gatherings of 10 or fewer people. So - by the letter of the law - Varma might just have slipped in (so to speak, sorry, I’ll stop now).

Except Varma and New York did everything possible to discourage all indoor gatherings during those not-so-halcyon days.

How do I know? Well, here’s what Varma wrote in June 2021, well after his sexcapades:

In April 2020, on assignment from the CDC, I became the senior adviser for public health in New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office…

In those days, “following the science” of public health was fairly straightforward: It meant mandating masks and physical distancing, promoting widespread testing and isolation when necessary, and, crucially, restricting the right of businesses and other entities to welcome people from different households indoors.

…[Everyone needed] to sacrifice for one another by wearing masks, maintaining distance, and exercising constant vigilance [and] any indoor gathering of people from different households risked transmission to large numbers of people from different social networks. [emphasis added]

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Gee. I wonder how anyone could have thought group sex parties violated those rules!

But maybe The Atlantic didn’t know how strict Varma had really been when it defended him? Maybe it hadn’t seen his views on the risks of indoor gatherings?

Except.

Varma wrote those words in - wait for it - The Atlantic itself. Can’t make it up. (Hey, at least the magazine protects its own.)

As Varma was taking Ecstasy and getting naked with his wife and friends in a hotel room, my family had to have a memorial service for my dad, who died of leukemia in Manhattan in May 2020, over Zoom.

Relatable indeed.

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Then there’s the sad saga of Olivia Nuzzi, a 31-year-old writer who is New York magazine’s Washington political correspondent.

The precise details of Nuzzi’s “personal relationship” with RFK Jr., who is old enough to be her grandfather, are not clear. But multiple outlets have reported Nuzzi sent Kennedy a passel of… not-safe-for-work… texts and photos.

The online newsletter Puck referred to “demure” nudes (isn’t that a contradiction in terms?). The Daily Beast explained Nuzzi had been busted after RFK bragged about them to his friends, like the teen prankster serious presidential candidate he is.

Amazingly, Nuzzi offered this pearl of wisdom in 2015:

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(Gee, I wonder)

SOURCE

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But as stunning as Nuzzi’s cavalier flouting of basic journalism standards is the way many Washington and political reporters have jumped to Nuzzi’s defense. They argue sexual relationships between reporters and sources are common - and that Democratic and media establishment are somehow punishing Nuzzi for writing about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline in July.

These defenses are - for lack of a more elegant word - bullshit.

To take the second one first, Nuzzi was no profile in courage when it came to covering Biden’s mental failures. New York magazine published her “expose,” which was called “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden,” after his disastrous June 27 debate, not before. She didn’t begin the pile-on, she gleefully joined it.

In reality, as I wrote on July 5, before the debate, “Nuzzi and the rest [of the Washington press corps] were part of the “conspiracy of silence” as much as any Democratic donor.”

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No, the revelation of her “relationship” with RFK Jr. wasn’t some carefully orchestrated Democratic plot to get back at Nuzzi for her piece.

She brought this catastrophe on herself through her ethical blindness.

But what’s more amazing and infuriating is the way Washington journalists have simply waved off Nuzzi’s tangle with Kennedy as par for the course. As Ben Smith,² former New York Times reporter and founder of the media Website Semafor, wrote:

Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources. The most compromising of all, and the most common, is a reporter’s fealty to someone who gives them information. That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.

You won’t hear many American journalists reckon with this. (Some British journalists, naturally, have been texting us to ask what the fuss is about. If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?) The advice writer Heather Havrilesky texted me Saturday that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”

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Sorry, Ben, wrong again.

I referred to Nuzzi’s blindness as “ethical” instead of “moral” for a reason. Nuzzi was affianced at the time of her “relationship” with Kennedy (she is no more). Kennedy, a notorious serial adulterer, was married.

That’s a bitter pill - for their significant others. But what matters far more to the rest of us is the public relationship between Nuzzi, the political journalist, and Kennedy, a candidate in the race she was covering.

Yes, Smith is right that the relationship between sources and reporters can be complicated. But this part is simple. A reporter who offers to trade sex for information is offering a bribe. A reporter who simply falls for a source and gives up sex for free is hopelessly compromised and needs to report the relationship and be removed from coverage immediately.

Don’t screw your sources or the people you cover. And don’t send them nudes.

It’s not a lot to ask.

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(Most of my sources are scientific journals, so sex with them would be tough.)

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Yet the media elite, particularly in Washington, is so far out of touch that it views drug-fueled orgies as “relatable” and sexual relationships between journalists and their sources as par for the course.

I have never been so happy to be alone, writing this Substack, accountable to no one but myself - and all of you.

1. There was a third scandal on Friday, too. CNN reported Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, had from 2008 through 2011 posted comments on a pornographic Website that differ sharply from his current public statements on sex, abortion, and transgender rights. They also included graphic stories about having sex with his wife’s sister. Robinson has denied the report but has not sued CNN for libel - as he very likely would if the article were actually false.

Still, even assuming the comments are indeed Robinson’s, his situation doesn’t exactly match the other two. The reason is that he was not in a position of power when he made them, and he had no reason to think he would ever be. At the time, he was not in politics, did not have a college degree, was working in a furniture factory, and had filed for bankruptcy three times.

In other words, Robinson’s alleged behavior was surely unsavory, but his personal hypocrisies were just that - personal, not political or public.

As he runs for governor, it is fair to ask whether he still believes what he allegedly wrote, or how he squares it with his hard-edged views now. But the question may be academic. Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign appears to be collapsing, with most of his staff quitting over the weekend.

2. Full disclosure, early in Covid, Smith wrote a piece about me for The New York Times. It wasn’t fair, but it was fairer than the rest of the coverage I received.