Blockers: Michael Lewis on the Rebels in the Deep State

How to resist bad government? Become a dissident is the standard response. But what happens if you work in that government? And if that government tampers with or eliminates your job?

That’s the focus of Blockers, the new bestseller by Michael Lewis about the rebels in the deep state that resisted the second Trump administration. It takes its title from Elon Musk, who instructed the DOGE twenty-somethings he sent to Washington to find the “blockers” and eliminate them. On Musk, Lewis is withering. A man of incessant lies, he concludes. And worse. When Musk named a USIP contact as a Taliban ally on Fox News, the Taliban — who knew perfectly well he wasn’t one — rounded up his family for beatings. Lewis calls that “treason.” Perhaps the deep state should investigate.

Lewis features six blockers. They are mostly career civil servants who knew the law and declined to break it. Kathleen Walters, the chief privacy officer at the IRS, was asked to hand the Department of Homeland Security a database of seven million undocumented workers, including their home addresses, so that ICE could round them up. Walters said no, and it cost her her career. Others in the same building folded and, presumably, are still at their desks. One wonders how well they sleep at night now. Maybe, as I suggest to Lewis, his next book will be about them.

Michael Lewis is careful not to call any of his blockers dissidents, a mantle, he says, they wouldn’t accept. But he does say some of them are admirable in the same way as the people who resisted the Germans rolling into Paris. Dissidents or not, deep state rebels like Kathleen Walters are case studies in civic virtue. All Americans should recognize their quietly heroic work.

FURTHER READING

•   Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State (W. W. Norton, October 2026). The companion volume is The Fifth Risk, his 2018 book on the first Trump transition.

•   Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (Norton, August 2026) — the case against technologizing the state, which AK puts to him here.

•   Max Stier’s Partnership for Public Service — the organization Lewis calls the most worthy of your dollars, and the body behind the Sammies.

•   Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance — the argument about state capacity that this book joins from the other direction.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Michael Lewis is the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Fifth Risk and Going Infinite, among many others. He hosts the podcast Against the Rules and lives in Berkeley, California.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.