Yesterday, I got into an argument with Chelsea Clinton. On Twitter. About Hannah Arendt.

It began with Clinton tweeting this really upsetting story from the Washington Post about a man who set fire to a LGBT youth center in Phoenix. The headline of the piece read:

Man casually empties gas can in Phoenix LGBT youth center, sets it ablaze

Here’s what Clinton tweeted, along with that headline.

The banality of evil: https://t.co/BbhxhmGl0q — Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 28, 2017

I didn’t think Clinton was using Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” correctly. I retweeted her with some snide commentary.

This is what happens when you know something as a cliche or slogan rather than as an idea. Totally the opposite of what Arendt meant. https://t.co/Rh8jT7jlct — corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 28, 2017

Sidwell Friends, Stanford, Oxford, Columbia: all that money for fancy schools, and nowhere did you learn the meaning of this phrase? — corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 28, 2017

To my surprise, Clinton didn’t appreciate my commentary.

No, let me rephrase that.

To my surprise, Chelsea Clinton—author of a best-selling book; vice chair of a powerful global foundation; former special correspondent for NBC; possible congressional candidate, with a net worth of $15 million; daughter of the former president of the United States; daughter of the former Secretary of State and almost-president of the United States—read my tweet.

To my even greater surprise, Chelsea Clinton had an opinion about my tweet.

And to my even greater greater surprise, Chelsea Clinton responded to my tweet.

Hi Corey-Did you watch the video or read the article? Comment wasn’t about the headline. Thankful to have read Arendt at Sidwell & Stanford — Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 28, 2017

How do you respond to Chelsea Clinton? On Twitter? About Hannah Arendt?

I thought about that a bit.

And then it hit me: The way you respond to any mistaken comment on Twitter about Hannah Arendt.

So I re-read the article, just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything the first time around, and tweeted my reply.

I read the article, which suggests the arsonist is mentally unbalanced or has a personal beef. How do you think that holds up your claim? — corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 28, 2017

Now I need to make a detour and explain something about Eichmann in Jerusalem.

One of the key questions Arendt takes up in that book is: What motivated Eichmann to help organize the mass murder of the Jews?

Was he crazy?

No, says Arendt.

Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal”—”More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable”…Behind the comedy of the soul experts lay the hard fact that his was obviously no case of moral let alone legal insanity.

Did Eichmann personally hate the Jews?

No, says Arendt.

His was obviously no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind. He “personally” never had anything whatever against Jews; on the contrary, he had plenty of “private reasons” for not being a Jew hater.

This, as virtually every reader of Arendt knows, was one of her more controversial moves, and it has plagued her and discussion of her book ever since. But regardless of one’s position on Arendt’s argument, it’s a relatively well known fact—certainly well known to anyone who’s read the book—that one of the central postulates of the book is that Eichmann’s crimes cannot be explained by his personal animus to the Jews.

According to the original Washington Post piece that Clinton was referencing, the Phoenix arsonist had once used the services of the LGBT youth center. From 2013 to 2016, when, the article reports, he turned 25 and “aged out.” So why did the arsonist do it? The article doesn’t reach any conclusions, but it strongly suggests that the man is mentally unstable and in desperate need of some kind of psychiatric care.

“This news hurts,” executive director Linda Elliott said in a news conference Wednesday. “Obviously this young man has issues and needs help.” …The center staff last made contact with him about two months ago. He apparently also sought services at other organizations in the Valley. … A number of the young people who come to One-n-Ten struggle with mental illness and behavioral health problems.

Virtually nothing in the story is suggestive of the banality of evil. Not the arsonist’s motives. Nor his deeds: one of the major issues of contention in and around the Eichmann trial as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem was that this was a man who had sent millions of people to their death, without ever (or hardly ever; I’d have to re-read the whole book to say for sure), lifting a hand against them. Eichmann’s crimes were not ones of personal or direct violence; they were of a completely different order.

So that’s why, to get back to my exchange with Clinton, I tweeted that I had read the article but still wondered why she thought it held up her claim regarding the banality of evil.

Hours went by. I didn’t hear back from her, which is exactly what I would have expected.

I mean, if I were Clinton, I wouldn’t be wasting my time with me.

But I’m not Clinton, so I did waste my time with me. I tweeted out a few other comments about the strangeness of this exchange (one of which I’ll come to below).

Then, on Friday night—Friday night!—Clinton came back to the conversation.

With this:

Anyone who commits arson “casually” or not “needs help.” In 2017, the “casually” reminded me of @PeterDreier piece https://t.co/NTl19OFgLW — Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 28, 2017

Remember, Clinton had opened this exchange with the assertion that she wasn’t responding to the headline of the article but to something in the article itself, not conveyed in the headline. Now she was claiming the opposite: she was responding to the headline.

I replied.

Ah, so you were in fact responding to the headline after all. — corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 29, 2017

I also thought about tweeting that nothing in Eichmann in Jerusalem suggests that Arendt believes Eichmann was casual about his crimes. In fact, as Arendt goes to great lengths to show, he was extraordinarily meticulous and conscientious about his crimes, demonstrating great initiative and care in their execution. He took his “duty” to organize the mass murder of Jewish men, women, and children very seriously.

But I figured, eh, it’s Friday night, let it go.

Also, I figured we were done.

We weren’t.

Remember, earlier in the day, while Clinton was off doing more important things than arguing with me—On Twitter. About Hannah Arendt—I had been tweeting random thoughts about how surreal, almost lunarly surreal, this whole exchange was.

This was one of my tweets:

When do I get to start including in my bio “Once argued with Chelsea Clinton on Twitter about the meaning of Hannah Arendt”? — corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 28, 2017

Kinda lame, I know, but I was kinda flabbergasted—I’d say gobsmacked, but that word annoys me—by the fact that I was arguing with Chelsea Clinton. On Twitter. About Hannah Arendt.

Anyway, on Friday night, Chelsea Clinton returned to that tweet. With this response:

Now? Never? The increased level of hate crimes & desensitization to violence to me is redolent of Arendt’s caution. Will read your article. — Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 29, 2017

That article she’s referencing is this one. Someone on Twitter had pointed her to it.

But that reference to the desensitization to violence in Eichmann in Jerusalem: What was she talking about?

In Eichmann, Arendt had argued almost the opposite.

When Eichmann learned of the planned extermination of the Jews, Arendt says that he was shocked. He proceeded to cope with that knowledge, and the role he was to play in the Holocaust, not by desensitizing himself to violence but by wrapping his actions and deeds in all manner of “language rules”—euphemisms, jargon, and the like—that prevented him from knowing not what it was that he was physically, actually doing (that, he always knew: organizing the mass murder of the Jews) but the moral significance of what he was doing.

And even then, as Arendt goes on to point out in excruciating detail, when he was brought face to face with the actuality of violence, when the facts broke through that scrim of words that was built to disguise the meaning of those facts, Eichmann couldn’t take it.

The system [of language rules], however, was not a foolproof shield against reality, as Eichmann was soon to find out…. Shortly after this, in the autumn of the same year, he was sent by his direct superior Müller to inspect the killing center in the Western Regions of Poland that had been incorporated into the Reich, called the Warthegau. The death camp was at Kulm (or, in Polish, Chelmno), where, in 1944, over three hundred thousands Jews from all over Europe, who had first been “resettled” in the Lódz ghetto, were killed. Here things were already in full swing, but the method was different; instead of gas chambers, mobile gas vans were used. This is what Eichmann saw: The Jews were in a large room; they were told to strip; then a truck arrived, stopping directly before the entrance to the room, and the naked Jews were told to enter it. The doors were closed and the truck started off. “I cannot tell [how many Jews entered], I hardly looked. I could not; I could not; I had had enough. The shrieking, and…I was much too upset, and so on…I then drove along after the van, and then I saw the most horrible sight I had thus far seen in my life. The truck was making for an open ditch, the doors were opened, and the corpses were thrown out, as though they were still alive, so smooth were their limbs. They were hurled into the ditch, and I can still see a civilian extracting the teeth with tooth pliers. And then I was off—jumped into my car and did not open my mouth any more.

Page after page, Arendt narrates incidents and encounters like these. And nowhere does she question Eichmann’s veracity in telling of these encounters. (Though she does seem to question or mock his legal strategy: as if he could slip out of the hangman’s noose by showing that despite being a self-confessed mass murderer, he somehow didn’t enjoy the work.)

Desensitization to violence, in other words, was not one of Eichmann’s problems, at least as Arendt saw it.

I pointed some of these passages out to Clinton.

Except she argues that Eichmann didn’t get desensitized to violence. He could barely tolerate the sight of it, she said. pic.twitter.com/WwUNr0x9vV — corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 29, 2017

And that, mercifully, was the end of it.

Except for this guy.

Honestly? All of you people are just being assholes. Find something better to do with your times/lives. — Jordan Horowitz (@jehorowitz) July 28, 2017

So she can’t possibly know/understand Arendt because *you* are the one who knows/understands Arendt. Got it. (FYI I have never read Arendt) — Jordan Horowitz (@jehorowitz) July 28, 2017

I haven’t read Arendt. But she was talking about the headline. She made that clear. — Jordan Horowitz (@jehorowitz) July 29, 2017

Who is Jordan Horowitz, you may ask?

He’s this guy.

Remember the Academy Awards this year, when at first it seemed that La La Land had won, then it turned out that Moonlight won? That guy in the video, announcing this sudden plot twist at the Oscars, was Jordan Horowitz, co-producer of La La Land.

And that’s Jordan Horowitz protecting Chelsea Clinton—author of a best-selling book; vice chair of a powerful global foundation; former special correspondent to NBC; possible congressional candidate, with a net worth of $15 million; daughter of the former president of the United States; daughter of the former Secretary of State and almost-president of the United States—from me.

So why am I telling you all this?

Because I still can’t go over the fact that yesterday, I got into an argument with Chelsea Clinton. On Twitter. About Hannah Arendt.

We have in this country a really weird ruling class.

Update (4:20)

Originally, I had a different conclusion, based on a series of tweets that I thought were Clinton’s but turned out to be a parody account (thanks to the good people of Twitter who pointed that out to me and saved me from even more embarrassment!) Ordinarily, when I make a mistake or error on this blog, I simply strike through the mistake. In order not to hide the error or pretend that I didn’t make it. I would have done that in this case, but since 3/4 of what I had were tweets from that parody account, and you can’t do strike-through’s with tweets, I’ve simply deleted the whole thing. Sorry for the confusion.

Update (5:55)

People seem to be confused by my update. Let me try this again. In the original post, there were a few (as in three) tweets at the VERY END of the post that turned out to be from a parody account. You can see what those posts were in the links that I provide in my update at 4:20. All the other tweets from Clinton which I respond to in this blog—i.e., EVERY TWEET YOU’VE JUST BEEN READING ABOVE, BEFORE THE UPDATE—is a real tweet from Clinton. In other words, I did have an exchange with Clinton, which you’ve just read here.