The most important thing to know about both the chittering Renfields gnawing through the ductwork of the American administrative state and the billionaire sociopath they serve is that they don't care. Every bit of damage they have done and will do springs from and follows this fundamental fact. They don't know anything about what they're wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don't care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things. They do not care about or understand the state because they do not acknowledge that it is valid; they do not care about or understand public service or public servants because they refuse the premise that such things could even exist. This goes beyond the private sector's familiar and self-flattering disdain for the public sector, which amounts to the load-bearing assumption that everything and everyone operating outside of the free market is somehow the minor leagues. There is another opposition at work here, a crabbed and curdled worldview that reflects libertarianism's signature balance of ideological resentment and pure childish certitude, and which is defined by the smash-and-grab anti-ethos of the vandal, but which is finally simpler and stupider than either.

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