In the Treasury Department, the EPA, and the FCC, employees have been found to routinely spend the equivalent of a full workday every week watching pornography on their office computers. Most of those crank-yanking bureaucrats are still on your payroll. At the Commerce Department, paralegals spent their days shopping online and trolling dating sites because they were assigned no work — their supervisors were afraid giving their employees work would “antagonize the labor union.” In California, the teachers’ union has gone to bat to keep pedophile teachers on the payroll after they were found to be having sex with children. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo managed to corrupt an anti-corruption task force. The IRS and the ATF are routinely used as political weapons. The nice liberal Democrats in Flint, Mich., poisoned the city’s children in the name of infrastructure spending.

Despite all of the dark whispering the NRA and “dark money,” the right-wing bogeymen mostly are minor players. The two major teachers’ unions are between them the biggest political spender in Washington, with the NEA and the ATF spending a combined $50 million in the 2014 cycle. AFSCME, the government-employees’ union, spent $11 million that cycle, and was the twelfth-largest overall political spender. The NRA, which barely cracks the top-300 list, spent less than $1 million. Beyond spending on (overwhelmingly Democratic) political campaigns, government workers and their unions also show up to vote, to knock on doors, and to bully, harass, and threaten nonconformists. They are the backbone of the Democratic party — and they are thieving, lazy, grasping, thieving, dishonest, thieving, pervy, thieving, detestable, despicable, thieving, thieving thieves with a minor sideline in violence and intimidation.

Which brings us back to Melissa Click, who criminally assaulted an undergraduate student journalist for attempting to commit an act of journalism. As of this writing, she is still on track for tenure. Jail? She won’t even be formally convicted of her crime if she manages to go twelve months without committing a significant crime in public.

For all the talk about “privilege,” this is a much more familiar phenomenon: This is what it means to have a ruling class.