Here we have a guy who is credibly accused of sexual assault, loves to coach young female athletes, and reportedly hires only beautiful women to clerk for him. It doesn’t exactly stretch credulity to conclude that he is, at the very minimum, not someone you would leave your daughter around. But shockingly, that is exactly what Chua was preparing to do before he was nominated, by her own admission, in the form of a judicial clerkship.

As Zach Carter argues, the American aristocracy works by automatically bolstering the success and power of people who went to the right schools (most notably Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) and know the right people (generally any of those schools’ alumni in positions of power) and by automatically protecting them from consequences from wrongdoing. Its “highest pleasure is the knowledge shared among its members that they live above democratic accountability, that their words and deeds are not constrained by the broader political community the way the words and deeds of mere citizens can be,” he writes.

Concretely, this means that in the pinch, elites like Chua will swear up and down that one of someone’s gravest moral failings is in fact one of his greatest strengths, with the implicit promise that he will continue to be a source of favors and patronage for her. The benefit for aristocrats is the knowledge that — contrary to Chua’s book about raising genius children by forcing them to work like indentured servants — power and success will be handed to them on a silver platter. Thus her ridiculous defense of Kavanaugh: She serves as a duplicitous character witness and he gives her daughter a clerkship.