Letters from an American - November 16, 2025

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

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November 16th, 2025. On Thursday, November 13th, Michael Schmidt reported in the New York Times the story of the 17-year-old girl, the House Ethics Committee, found former representative Matt Gates, a Republican of Florida, likely paid to have sex with him. The girl was a homeless high schooler who needed to supplement the money she made from her job at McDonald's to be able to pay for braces. Through a sugar dating website that connected older men with younger women, she met Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, who introduced her to Gates. Both men allegedly took drugs with her and paid her for sex,

allegedly, including at a party at the home of a former Republican member of the Florida legislature, Chris Dorworth. The Justice Department charged Greenberg with sex trafficking a minor and having sex with a minor in exchange for money. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a decade in prison. The Justice Department did not charge Gates. In 2022, the girls' lawyers asked Gates and Dorworth about reaching a financial settlement with her. She didn't sue, but Dorworth sued her sparking depositions and disclosure of evidence. Dorworth dropped the case. That material has recently been released and made up some of Schmidt's portrait of the girl. Schmidt's story added another window into the world depicted in the more than 20,000 documents

the House Oversight Committee dropped from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein the day before. Those emails show a network of elite people, mostly but not exclusively men, from politics, business, academia, foreign leadership, and entertainment, who continued to seek chummy access to the wealthy Epstein, the information he retailed, and his contacts, despite his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from a minor. When accusations against Epstein resurfaced in 2018, along with public outrage over the sweetheart deal he received in 2008 from former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta, who in 2018 was Secretary of Labor in Trump's first administration, Trump ally Stephen Bannon worked with him to combat the story.

As Jason Wilson of The Guardian notes, Epstein and Bannon treated the crisis as a publicity problem to fix as they pushed Bannon's right-wing agenda and supported Trump. As David Smith of The Guardian put it, Epstein's inbox painted a picture of a world where immense wealth, privileged access, and proximity to power can insulate, individuals from accountability and consequences. For those inside the circle, the rules of the outside world do not apply. On Tuesday, November 4th, Elizabeth Dwaskin of the Washington Post described the ideology behind this world. She profiled Chris Buskirk of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization funded by tech leaders to create a network that will permit the MAGA movement to outlive Trump.

Dwaskin wrote that political strategists credit the Rockbridge Network with pushing J.D. Vance, one of the network's members, into the vice presidency. Dwaskin explains that Buskirk embraces a theory that says, a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward. Such an aristocracy, as he described his vision to Dwaskin, drives innovation. It would be a proper elite. that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers. When he's not working in politics, Buskirk is, according to Duoskin, pushing unrestrained capitalism

into American life. The government should support the country's innovators, network members say. We have heard this ideology before. In 1858, in a period in which a few fabulously wealthy elite enslavers in the the American South were trying to take over the government and create their own oligarchy. South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues that democracy meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them. Society worked best, he said, when it was run by natural leaders, the wealthy, educated, well-connected men who made up the South's planter

class. Hammond explained that society was naturally made up of a great mass of workers, rather dull people, but happy and loyal, whom he called mudsills after the timbers driven into the ground to support elegant homes above. These mudsills supported that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement, one that modeled itself on the British aristocracy. The mudsills needed the guidance of their betters to produce goods that would create capital, Hammond said. That capital would be wasted if it stayed among the mudsills. It needed to move upward, where better men would use it to move society forward. Hammond's ideology gave us the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, in which the Supreme Court found that

black Americans are not included and were not intended to be included under the words citizens in the Constitution and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges, which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. In 1889, during the Gilded Age, industrialist Andrew Carnegie embraced a similar idea when he explained that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few was not only inevitable in an industrial system, but was beneficial. The wealthy were stewards of society's money, administering it for the common good by funding libraries, schools, and so on to uplift everyone, rather than permitting individual workers to squander it in frivolity.

It was imperative, Carnegie thought, for the government to protect big business for the benefit of the country as a whole. Carnegie's ideology gave us the 1905 Lockner v. New York Supreme Court decision, declaring that states could not. require employers to limit workers' hours in a bakery to 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. The court reasoned that there was no need of such a law for workers' welfare or safety because there is no danger to the employee in a first-class bakery. The court concluded that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution protected freedom of contract, the right of employers to contract with laborers

at any price and for any hours the workers could be induced to accept. In 1929, after the great crash toward the bottom out of the economy, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon did not blame the systemic inequality his policies had built into the economy. He blamed lazy Americans and the government that served greedy constituencies. He told President Herbert Hoover not to interfere to help the country. liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate, he told Hoover. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down.

People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people. Melon's ideology gave us Hoovervilles, shanty towns built from packing boxes and other salvaged materials, and the Great Depression. Today, an ideology of aristocracy justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach,

while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior. Yesterday, Arian Campo Flores of the Wall Street Journal, reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion. Campo Flores outlined a world in which the ultra-rich are living in luxury and are increasingly sealed off from everyday people.

They don't wait in lines, they don't jostle with airport, crowds are idle unnecessarily in traffic, Campo Flores writes. Instead, an ecosystem of exclusive restaurants, clubs, resorts, and other service providers delivers them customized and exquisite experiences as fast as possible. The spaces they inhabit are often private, carefully curated, and populated by like-minded and similarly well-heeled peers. On the other end of the spectrum is the Trump administration's crusade against not just undocumented immigrants, but also legal immigrants, and darker-skinned Americans in general. But using the power of the state against those outside the aristocracy is more widespread than attacks on brown Americans.

Ellen Barry and Jason DeParl reported on October 29th in the New York Times that the future of Trump's policy for criminalizing unhoused people is taking shape in Utah. On the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the state is building a facility where it will commit 1,300 inmates. Refocusing homeless initiatives from providing housing toward rehabilitation and moral development, the involuntary confinement will end a harmful culture of permissiveness and guide homeless people toward human thriving through social and addiction services, according to political. political appointee Randy Shumway, who chairs the state's homeless services board and whose business promotes software used in case management for unhoused people. Critics note that funds are not currently available for those seeking such services, and with the Republicans' deep cuts to Medicaid, it's hard to see where more funding will come from, although at least some of it is being redirected from currently operating housing programs.

On November 6th, the Supreme Court reinstated a Trump policy requiring all new passports to reflect a person's biological sex at birth. As Steve Lattuck explained, in one-first, from 1992 to 2010, the State Department had allowed people who had undergone surgical reassignment to change their identification on their passports. From 2010 to 2025, they could submit a certificate from a doctor, saying they had undergone clinical treatment for gender transition. When he took office on January 20th, Trump issued an executive order overturning this 33-year policy, saying it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female, which it defined as an individual's immutable biological classification

as assigned at conception. Transgender identity, the order said, is false and corrosive to the country. Plaintiffs, led by Ashton Orr, sued, and on April 18th, U.S. District Judge Julia E. Kobich granted a motion to make the case a class action. She also granted a stay, finding that the plaintiffs would likely win on the merits of their claim that the new policy violates their right to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. The administration went to the Supreme Court for emergency relief. In Trump v. Orr, the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court reinstated Trump's policy, writing, displaying passport holders' sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth. In both cases, the government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to,

differential treatment. In addition to using a passport to travel, transgender Americans who live in states that don't recognize their transition often use their passports as identification in the US. On Friday, the State Department updated its website, committing to the new policy that effectively erases those people and forces them to conform to the MAGA ideology. In 1858, the year after the the Dred Scott decision, rising politician Abraham Lincoln explained to an audience in Chicago what a system that set some people above others meant. Arguments that those deemed inferior are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying, that as much is to be

done for them as their condition will allow, are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world, he said. They always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. This argument is the same old serpent that says, you work and I eat, you toil, and I will enjoy the fruits of it.

Turn in whatever way you will, whether it come from the mouth of a king, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent. In Lincoln's Day and in the Gilded Age and in the 1930s, Americans pushed back against those trying to establish an aristocracy in the United States. That project appears to be gaining speed as well in today's America,

where the rich and powerful are operating in cryptocurrencies and avoiding accountability, but where a majority of people would prefer to live in a world where a child does not have to sell her body to older men in order to save enough money to get braces on her teeth. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather. Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Mawes.