So Calculated, So Malignant, And So Devastating

The judgement of history. Plus God and MAGA at Yale

Jul 12, 2025

Welcome back, KTB readers.

Years ago, I browsed through a book called “Who's Who In Nazi Germany.” It names hundreds of mid- and lower-level Nazis and records each one’s individual actions. By naming and shaming its subjects, “Who’s Who…” was ensuring that they could never escape the judgement of history simply by being forgotten.

KTB is doing the same for mid- and lower-level MAGA.

Recording the names of fascists will always be a less worthy undertaking than recording the names of fascism’s victims. But both efforts are valuable. We name the persecuted to give them dignity; to give them justice, we name their persecutors.

Today, journalists, judges, academics, activists, and many others are doing the former: naming, both for today and for history, the Trump Administration’s victims (let’s pray that those victims will be far fewer, and will suffer far less, than Nazi victims).

KTB is naming the victimizers.

I hope that by doing so, KTB will help future historians deliver at least a small amount of justice to people MAGA has harmed. That through its naming and shaming, KTB is preventing less familiar Trumpers from escaping the judgement of history, facilitating the eventual triumph of historical justice.

No, that would not be as good as justice today or as good as stopping Trump from committing more injustices - goals that I still believe can be achieved by calling out Trump’s minions and imposing costs on them. But even justice delayed will be enough to have made KTB’s efforts worthwhile.

All cruelty springs from weakness

This week, KTB is naming and shaming Austin Bramwell who was almost the second coming of William F. Buckley.

Austin speaks with the same mid-Atlantic accent; he also went to Yale where he joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization Buckley founded for right-wing college students; and he gave a fawning speech about Buckley at ISI’s 50th Anniversary Dinner which Buckley attended as the guest of honor.

At that dinner, Buckley was so impressed (or maybe his ego was so tickled…), that a year later he appointed 24 year-old Austin to the newly constituted Board of Trustees at National Review, Buckley’s magazine where Austin had placed a short essay.

Two years later, Buckley fired Austin (officially, Buckley “asked” Austin to “quit”).

Nobody knows exactly how or why the master and his disciple fell out. But three years later, soon after Buckley’s death, Austin shared this remembrance:

On the whole, I didn't really enjoy [Buckley’s] company. Plainly, he liked me, but I found his constant boredom embarrassing. … I reproached him for showering me with honors that I could not live up to. ... “Fifteen hundred conservative grandees,” I reminded him, truthfully, “once heard you compare my writing to that of Seneca.” Seneca!

Ouch. A rather peevish and self-promoting eulogy, young Seneca...

By the time Austin penned those words, his career had recovered. He was on the partner track at a law firm (before his time at National Review, he had graduated from Harvard Law). And he was regularly placing essays in right-wing journals, using stuffy, overwrought, Buckley-like prose to share his views.

Those views include Austin’s interest in “politics in light of genetic science,” i.e. social eugenics; his “restrictionist” stand on immigration because of a supposed “ethnic solidarity of minorities against the traditional European majority”; and his hatred of gay marriage, about which he has written numerous essays.

In what must be the meanest of those essays, written pre-Obergefell, Austin asserts, “The gay-marriage debate has nothing to do with love, and everything to do with the normalization of certain specific and self-destructive kinds of acts.”

Er, “self-destructive?” In Austin’s mind, yes, a view he tries to explain with a lengthy, tasteless comparison of homosexuality and self-mutilation:

Like homosexual sex, self-mutilation poses obvious risks to bodily health that careful practitioners can nonetheless minimize or eliminate. Like homosexuality, it does no immediate harm to anyone else, and arguably does less, as the diseases associated with it are far less deadly. Like homosexuality, some people feel strongly compelled to practice it [and] prove resistant to therapy; indeed, unless reason supervenes over habit and inclination, they have trouble seeing anything wrong with it at all.

Wow. In just three sentences, Austin has called homosexuality unhealthy, has tried to legitimize conversion therapy, and has declared something “wrong with it [homosexuality]” that homosexuals “have trouble seeing.”

Austin wraps up his comparison by getting all deep and philosophical:

Like homosexuality, its pleasures are known only to a minority, but that minority can and does make claims on its behalf - such as that it relieves anxiety, teaches self-control, gives a certain thrill, and provides an experiential reminder of man's frailty.

Huh? Austin, man, you think way too much about gay sex.

Austin’s homophobia dates back at least to his law school days when, in an interview about his religion, he sniffed, “Most of those churches are full of homosexuals. There’s not a stuffy WASP among them.”

Perhaps that was an attempt at self-deprecating humor - spoiled by the implicitly homophobic “full of homosexuals” part. Or maybe his comment was genuine self-pity, and the homophobia intentional and explicit.

Either way, it’s bigotry - anti-gay bigotry which is one of many types of bigotry such as racism, sexism, classism, ageism…oh, speaking of which…

What you tend to get [in church] is a lot of flummery about sin, sin defined as racism, sexism, classism, ageism. Now, I suppose it is true that classism is a sin, but I do not like hearing the Christian faith used for partisan political ends.

That was also Austin, in the same interview.

Austin, I’m pretty sure that racism, sexism, classism, and ageism are sinful, and that denouncing them in church isn’t partisanship or politics, just an unobjectionable reminder to love thy neighbor.

Definitely the bowtie, Austin. And keep it crooked.

In 2014, Austin became a partner in his law firm, and in 2017, he took a leave of absence for a job in the first Trump Administration. Austin got appointed to a gig at the Treasury Department where he helped design and implement MAGA’s tax policies. A year later, he returned to his law firm.

But Austin wasn’t done with MAGA: five years later, Austin helped write Project 2025, the far-right’s infamous blueprint for MAGA-izing the government.

Austin is one of the “non-Contributors contributors” identified in a previous KTB post: he is one of the 37 individuals whose names are not listed in the “Contributors” section of the Project 2025 report, but are buried instead in an “author’s note.”

Austin is also in the Heritage Foundation’s “Presidential Personnel Database.” In its two prior posts, KTB went through this database which was leaked a few weeks ago and is a trove of wannabe Trump appointees. The database contains their names and their answers to a questionnaire, including some “short essay” answers.

So apparently, Austin wants to be a Trump apparatchik once more. Why? As he writes in his short essays, using some Buckley-esque puffery, Austin wants to help the government construct, “for each particular circumstance, that set of institutions and policies that promote human flourishing.”

So long as that human isn’t gay or a non-European immigrant, I suppose.

Alumni notes

Last week, KTB named and shamed Cameron Hamilton, who is in the Heritage Database. KTB overlooked that Cameron did get a job in the Trump Administration. Cameron was briefly the acting Administrator of FEMA - he was that guy who Trump fired one day after he told Congress not to abolish his agency!