If you still have one, cast your mind back to April, 2017: That’s when the prestigious publishing house of Little, Brown brought forth to a grateful nation Monsters of the Ivy League (we’re linking to Amazon ironically) by (none other than) Steve Radlauer and Ellis Weiner. (The volume’s subtitle, provided by the publisher without our even asking for it, is “A Gallery of Elite Assholes.”)
The book consists of around 80 witty, trenchant profiles of terrible, appalling men and women who had either graduated from, taught at, or founded Ivy League universities. We devised a series of icons, or “badges,” with which to identify the specific crimes, moral failures, and fucked-up behaviors appropriate to each individual. There are no fewer than forty of them. Here they are, spelled out, in world-famous alphabetical order:
Anti-Semite ; Authoritarian; Boob; Bully; Classification Pending; Dangerous Narcissist; Defender of Evil; Demagogue; Disgrace to Position; Disgrace to Profession; Domestic Terrorist; Douche; Eugenics Buff; Financial Fraudster; Greedy Bastard; Homophobe; Kiddie-Porner; Lowlife; Megalomaniac; Misogynist; Murderer; Pederast; Plagiarist; Racist; Religious Loon; Right-wing Nutbar; Scammer; Serial Killer; Sex Fiend; Shameless Liar; Slaver; Traitor; Useful Idiot; Vulgar Lout; War Criminal; Warmonger; White Supremacist; Wimp
Most of the entries display two or three of these badges. Some have four or five. Donald Trump (Wharton/Penn) has 17.
The book concludes with a sort of Appendix entitled “Beneath Contempt,” in which we gathered thirty-six more Ivy scumbags whose offenses, while notable, somehow fell short of the kind of complete monstrousness that would qualify their entry in the main text. The whole affair is, if we do say so ourselves, sharp, funny, eye-opening (Did you know that Yale was originally to be named Dummer College?), and includes excellent caricatures of the great, the near-great, and of us (!) by our late pal, Randy Jones. Voila!
Laura Ingraham
But that was nine years ago. Since then, it has come to our attention that there are other highly-placed, awful people of whom one or another Ivy League institution should be deeply ashamed. So we’re taking the opportunity to update MOTIL (our cute acronym for the book) with some late entries. Imagine the badges that go with the above descriptors and attach them to the following creatures as you see fit.
JEFF BEZOS (Princeton) – We all use Amazon, and we especially all used Amazon during COVID lockdown, so it’s hard to complain about it. Hard, but not impossible. In keeping with what Cory Doctorow memorably has called “enshittification,” a search on Amazon now will deliver results indistinguishable from ads, for the very good reason that they are ads. It’s annoying, as are the thousands—bajillions, really—of products offered by “companies” with names that resemble a not-so-promising Scrabble hand, like FLEXMMO and EURPLMY. But that’s not what’s monstrous.
No, what’s monstrous about Bezos—apart from that 417-foot-long superyacht (a boat so big it has its own 246-foot-long mini-yacht that loyally follows in its wake wherever it may cruise), or his sex-doll-made-flesh second wife (whose effigy graces the prow of his superyacht—we’re not kidding), or his self-congratulatory flight into “outer space” on his own hobby rocket, after which he posed for a press conference wearing a fucking cowboy hat—is his eager kowtowing to Donald Trump and his indulgence of Trump’s authoritarianism. Not to mention his corrosion and despoliation of the Washington Post, his ordering the paper not to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024, and his adjustment (read: pollution) of its editorial page by restricting it to matters of “personal freedom and open markets,” which is billionaire code for “oligarchy.” As someone recently said on Bluesky, Bezos should sell the Post to someone who actually cares about it.
PETE HEGSETH (Princeton) – While we can be a little ambivalent about Bezos, we can be passionate and full-throated in our contempt for the Secretary of Defense. (You heard us. Defense.) Millions have made fun of his alcoholism, but, really, that’s the least of it. Everything this idiot has done at DOD has degraded the department, harmed our national defense, insulted the armed forces, and embarrassed every American from sea to shining s. But go be surprised. After all, this is the clown who, at Princeton, was publisher and editor-in-chief of The Princeton Tory. (Was the name The Princeton Monarchist already taken?)
Should we mention (as outlined in gruesome detail in Wikipedia) his personal life? Should we get into the allegations of rape, the serial extramarital cheating and impregnation-of-women-not-his-wife, the email from his own mother denouncing his treatment of women, his admiration for the Crusades, his nutbar Christian sect led by a pastor who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote?
Nah. Let’s just focus on that moronic convocation he held of all the flag officers of the US military, dragging them from around the world to DC where he could lecture them about “the warrior ethos” and “lethality.” Let’s instead pay attention to his blatant racism and misogyny, dismissing black and female officers (all of whom have more military accomplishment than he), his absurd insistence on doing pullups (however ineptly) in public, his stomping on a skateboard and making it jump up and smash him in the nuts, his demand (routinely ignored) that all soldiers and sailors conform to a prep school’s code of no-facial hair, and his plan to test the entire US military for testosterone levels, as though wars are fought with muscular he-men and not (as they actually are, today) with drones.
And you wonder why the war against Iran is such a deadly, economy-tanking fiasco. Just kidding. You don’t wonder.
YOU DON’T WANT TO BUY THE SPLIT? THAT’S FINE. THEN BUY MONSTERS OF THE IVY LEAGUE. (JUST KIDDING. BUY THE SPLIT, TOO.)
MARK ZUCKERBERG (Harvard dropout) – We can’t remember, at the moment, whether “Zuck” originated, adapted, or stole the idea for Facebook (from the dazzlingly-named Winklevoss twins), but there’s no doubt he oversaw its growth into the massive social network behemoth it is today. And so what if the younger generations have abandoned it? We use it, we sort of like it, we stay in touch on it with our fellow Olds. Mark Zuckerberg was an actual programming and computing prodigy. Why, then, do we think of him as being such a dick?
Is it the Metaverse? Are we offended by the idea of an immersive online “world” best known—which is to say stolen from—Neal Stephenson’s (excellent) 1992 novel Snow Crash? Does it matter that (depending on whom you believe) the Facebook corporation—which renamed itself Meta in the process—lost upwards of $80 billion trying to develop a platform in which, thanks to virtual reality goggles, we would embody ourselves in animated avatars (legless; legs were hard to render back then) and hang out all day doing kooky, weird computer stuff? No. It sounds awful, and we were never tempted by its progenitor, Second Life. But anyone can make a business mistake. (Fun Fact: The Wikipedia entry on Zuckerberg is long and detailed, but makes no mention of the Metaverse. Has Zuck bought himself editing privileges over there?)
No, the dick part comes from: The enshittification of Facebook (cluttered with ads, stupid “engagement bait” offerings, venal algorithms, etc.), Zuck’s apparent indifference to—or active approval of—the pernicious effects of Instagram (owned by Meta) on teenagers, and, of course, his Bezos-like prostration before Donald Trump. What is the point of having all those billions if you can’t decline to kiss the ass of the worst American who ever lived?
SCOTT BESSENT (Yale) – Yeah, this douchebag. Every day, it seems, Treasury Secretary Bessent appears on this or that broadcast to lie with Trump-like shamelessness about the economy, America’s relationship to Canada, and anything else his master chooses. This is the mook who published, on the Fox News website, “President Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Will Unleash Parallel Prosperity,” with the science-fiction sub-hed, “Largest tax cut for American workers aims to cement blue-collar boom and make life affordable again.”
As is the case with every other member of Trump’s cabinet, Bessent serves without hesitation or scruple a man who, every day in every way, is proving himself literally insane. And, if memory serves, Bessent was the one who assured us that his grandmother would be unfazed if she missed a Social Security check. (He’s worth half a billion dollars. He would be perfectly able to slip Nana a couple of C-notes to tide her over.)
CORRECTION: That was not Bessent. It was Howard Lutnik. And the reference wasn’t to his grandmother, but to his mother-in-law. We regret the error.
Bessent compared Canada’s response to the lunatic trade war initiated against it by the US to that of a dachshund which used to torment his German shepherd until the bigger dog “had had enough.”
He also seems to get into a lot of shouting matches with his fellow bigshots. He called Zelensky “a little fucker,” threatened to punch Bill Pulte, traded loud imprecations with Elon Musk, and apparently recently engaged Trump economic adviser Kevin “Grinning Idiot” Hasset in a fistfight. Touchy touchy! Or maybe, as the first openly gay Treasure Secretary, Bessent is insecure about his masculinity. We propose that he and Hegseth duke it out, bare-fisted, slurping testosterone smoothies between rounds, on Pay-Per-View. Who wouldn’t watch?
JD Vance (Yale) – Yes, yes, we know: what is there to say about this repellent asshole that hasn’t been already said? That he’s a soulless opportunist with no fundamental values other than his own advancement? That he is incapable of not sounding patronizing? That he delivers his lies glazed with a phony “sincerity” that conveys his belief that you’re stupid enough to believe them?
Well, yeah. All that and more. Add to that the fact that he just published a much-derided spiritual memoir about his conversion to Catholicism that a) featured, on its cover, a photo of a Methodist church, and b) somehow made no mention of his abject servitude to a man who embodies literally every one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Vance also, as we noted last week, told an interviewer that, while he strives to “do as much of God’s work as possible right now,” if that results in “the End Times,” he’s okay with it. This is—how to put it?—a deeply idiotic thing to say. Nothing JD Vance (or anybody else) does is going to trigger the Rapture, foster the rise of the Antichrist, initiate the Seven-Year Tribulation, bring about th OH JUST NEVER MIND. Go touch up your eyeliner and leave us alone.
ELON MUSK (University of Pennsylvania) – For several years, now, we and others have jokingly, facetiously, not-really-meaning-it-ly referred to Musk as a “Bond villain.” Well, the jokes are over. That’s exactly what he is. The vast fortune, the satellite and rocket industries, the futuristic electric cars (and, now, gold-colored Cybercabs, which, frighteningly, lack both steering wheels and pedals), the government-subverting DOGE rampage…one thinks of Hugo Drax from Moonraker, who is (in Claude’s description) “outwardly a beloved British industrialist building a ‘defense’ rocket, secretly a former Nazi plotting to nuke London.”
Note the “Nazi” part. Musk seems, more and more, to have come out of the closet, master-race-wise. Forget that notorious Heil-Hitler salute from years ago. Focus, instead, on his brute racism (denying having overseen the deaths of over half a million Africans with the elimination of USAID), his support for the far-right, Neo-Nazi AfD party in the recent German election, and his overt white supremacist statements.
We admit that we kind of play fast and loose with the term “monsters,” both in MOTIL and here. (It’s called “exaggeration.” As Trump would say, “there’s no ‘z’ in it. A lot of people don’t know that.”) With Musk, however, the word is almost too timid. From The Guardian:
Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying. The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output. The posts, made on his platform X, reflect a renewed embrace of what extremism experts describe as white supremacist material.
First Trump, then Musk. EW’s alma mater (yes, he admits graduating from Penn, but he swears he’s no MOTIL) has some ‘splainin’ to do.
Then again, so do we. What, after all, does this have to do with Splitsville, which every schoolchild knows is our term for a single geo-political entity that harbors two or more distinct “nations”? Maybe this: The US may not be a Russia-style oligarchy, but if it never quite becomes one it won’t be for lack of trying, by these five wealthy Ivy monsters and their Ivy SecDef lackey. They’re all part of one “nation,” i.e., the nation of the super-wealthy and those who willingly serve them. They want more and more—it is literally never enough—and will do whatever they can to take it from the rest of us.
The other “nation” (and there are only two, in this formulation) consists of everybody else. The monsters have the money. We have the numbers. How this will all play out, knows God.
IT’S NATIONAL TV DINNER DAY AND WORLD SUICIDE PREVENTION DAY. THEY CANCEL EACH OTHER OUT. SO BUY THE SPLIT ALREADY.
I treasure my copy of the original 2017 Monsters of the Ivy League and am holding on to it forever, or until I can count on big bux through an ebay sale, whichever comes first.
So many monsters, and so little time to count 'em all!
OMg so good you guys, a veritable reason to go on living!