“I don’t know what’s worse. Is he just a liar, or is he a fabulist? Either one is disturbing.” — Michael Lewis on Elon Musk
How to resist bad government? Become a dissident is the standard response. But what happens if you work in that government? And if that government tampers with or eliminates your job?
That’s the focus of Blockers, the new bestseller by Michael Lewis about the rebels in the deep state that resisted the second Trump administration. It takes its title from Elon Musk, who instructed the DOGE twenty-somethings he sent to Washington to find the “blockers” and eliminate them. On Musk, Lewis is withering. A man of incessant lies, he concludes. And worse. When Musk named a USIP contact as a Taliban ally on Fox News, the Taliban — who knew perfectly well he wasn’t one — rounded up his family for beatings. Lewis calls that “treason.” Perhaps the deep state should investigate.
Lewis features six blockers. They are mostly career civil servants who knew the law and declined to break it. Kathleen Walters, the chief privacy officer at the IRS, was asked to hand the Department of Homeland Security a database of seven million undocumented workers, including their home addresses, so that ICE could round them up. Walters said no, and it cost her her career. Others in the same building folded and, presumably, are still at their desks. One wonders how well they sleep at night now. Maybe, as I suggest to Lewis, his next book will be about them.
Michael Lewis is careful not to call any of his blockers dissidents, a mantle, he says, they wouldn’t accept. But he does say some of them are admirable in the same way as the people who resisted the Germans rolling into Paris. Dissidents or not, deep state rebels like Kathleen Walters are case studies in civic virtue. All Americans should recognize their quietly heroic work.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Michael Lewis is the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Fifth Risk and Going Infinite, among many others. He hosts the podcast Against the Rules and lives in Berkeley, California.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
02:20 — Where the title comes from, and what Musk meant
03:42 — Admirable the way resisting the Germans in Paris was admirable
04:05 — Kathleen Walters and the seven million home addresses
05:25 — Francis Collins, and a bullet in the back of the head
06:32 — From the rational-legal state to the patrimonial one
08:30 — Russell Vought and the fifty billion dollars
09:25 — Sahil Lavingia, the DOGE recruit who went back
12:18 — Can the state be reinvented?
14:00 — The US Institute of Peace, and a man named on Fox News
15:23 — That’s treason
17:45 — Is he a liar or a fabulist?
19:10 — What Americans say about trust, and what they do
23:10 — Drilling eight rungs down to find a loyalist
24:19 — Will there be a bloodletting?
27:15 — Has any of it made a difference?
31:08 — Closing