“Consent is probably modern society’s most pernicious fetish.”
It would seem bad enough if that internet comment from the newly hired congressional counsel for Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was about women. But this statement criticizing the notion of consent—which Gaetz’s counsel, Andrew Kloster, posted in the comments section of a Volokh Conspiracy post sometime around 2013—came in reply to a blog titled, “Government Out of Bedrooms, but into Barnyards,” which endorsed a libertarian framework for rejecting consent as a legitimate basis for bans on bestiality.
Kloster—a self-described “raging misogynist” who was hired in Gaetz’s D.C. office last month—is a prolific tweeter. He seems to find a particular thrill in controversy, which he often folds into his brand of “new right” contrarian conservatism.
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But Kloster’s online rhetoric frequently veers from controversial into off-putting, offensive, and outright bizarre. And he hasn’t let his employment in Congress get in the way.
Last month, Kloster tweeted, “You know what I need? I need a woman who looks like she got punched.”
That post came in reply to a woman’s tweet, which read, “Any good guy will date you just as long as you’re sweet and normal and happy and the way you look and dress doesn’t embarrass him. You don’t need lip injections.”
Kloster currently faces a charge for assault that causes bodily injury against a family member, according to court records in Collin County, Texas. The class A misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of a year in jail and a $4,000 fine, as long as the defendant has no previous domestic violence charges.
Kloster’s hiring in Congress coincides with reports last month revealing that Gaetz had honored a man accused of murder who has yet to face trial, inviting him to lead the House Judiciary’s inaugural Pledge of Allegiance. Gaetz has since apologized, including to the victim’s family, reportedly telling them his office fired the people in charge of background checks. But questions remain about how Gaetz and his office missed that little smudge on the man’s record.
The punched woman tweet was still up as of Monday afternoon. But because Kloster has a history of deleting tweets in response to media inquiries, we archived it, along with the other charming tweets mentioned in this article. After The Daily Beast contacted Kloster, he began deleting those posts. (A screenshot of Kloster’s bestiality comment is available here.)
Two days after that post—perhaps to clear up any confusion—Kloster tweeted that he’s a “raging misogynist.”
“I’m 100% women respecter precisely because I’m a raging misogynist. I’m so kind you’ll want to kill yourself and die, which is the goal,” Kloster posted. (Deleted and archived.) He followed that up with the reply, “And I never miss a gyn.” (Deleted and archived.)
Kloster was apparently tackling a broad range of subjects that day. He also tweeted that “slavery was voluntary.” (Deleted and archived.)
“(1) slaves did everything (2) white ppl didn’t free the slaves,” Kloster wrote. “Conclusion: slavery was voluntary.”
(That came as a reply to his own tweet (deleted and archived) which read, “If slavery was so important why did the south lose.” That tweet itself quoted a post from white supremacist collaborator Jack Posobiec, who was critiquing a scene denouncing slavery from the Disney animated series The Proud Family.)
Lest his point go lost, a week later Kloster wrote—this time seemingly unprompted—that “slaves owe us reparations.”
“Slaves built america. Therefore,,, Slaves owe us reparations,” he tweeted. (Deleted and archived.)
Gaetz’s office didn’t reply to a request for comment. The Daily Beast sent a text message seeking comment to a phone number affiliated with Kloster, as well as an email to his official House address, but didn’t receive a reply. The deletions, which appear tailored to subjects addressed in this article, began minutes after that email was sent.
Kloster—a graduate of New York University School of Law and a former clerk with the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals—is hardly a political neophyte. The bios on his Federalist Society contributor page and an official government site tout the positions he held in Donald Trump’s administration, including posts as associate director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and deputy general counsel in the Office of Personnel Management, where he was eventually promoted to acting general counsel.
President Joe Biden quickly ousted Kloster from his holdover Trump-appointed sinecure at the Administrative Conference of the United States.
He’s claimed on podcasts, bios, and his LinkedIn page that he most recently worked as general counsel at a nonprofit called “Personnel Policy Operations.” That group maintains a bare-bones website which declares, “Personnel is policy. We arm, prepare, and defend conservative, America First public servants.” However, an IRS nonprofit search returned no documentation under that name, and The Daily Beast could not find any registration records.
It’s also hard to find Kloster’s past social media posts, though the Associated Press may have shed some light on why that is. When they reached out to Kloster for comment on a Sept. 2021 article, AP reported, he “deleted nearly all of the tweets on his Twitter account.”
However, at least one deletion in the months after that article appears to have been targeted.
On Feb. 7, 2022, Kloster tweeted that he had enjoyed the movie Leon The Professional, adding, “Natalie Portman should have stayed 11 years old.” He then clarified that he meant that Portman—who won the Best Actress Oscar at age 30—was “great” in the movie, and “her career since then hasn't been as good.” (Kloster appears to have scrapped those tweets after catching a not insignificant amount of criticism.)
Other screenshots of Kloster tweets, obtained by The Daily Beast, say, “If you don’t defend child pornographers, we are only one step away from naziism,” and bemoan the end of Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as House Speaker—specifically the loss of “prime time Nancy juggz.” (Kloster recently tweeted (deleted and archived) that he enjoys using replies to “needle people with bad politics,” a bill these tweets would certainly seem to fit.)
Kloster, like his former boss, Trump, has also dabbled in race relations.
A few days before tweeting that slaves “owe us reparations,” Kloster apparently tried to deploy subtlety to imply that the government should disarm the Black population. (Deleted and archived.)
And two days before that one—Feb. 5—Kloster called Chinese people uncivilized and likened them to raccoons. (Deleted and archived.)
“I realize that I’m perhaps conceding too much by referring to ‘China’ as a civilization,” he posted, adding a helpful clarification: “I’m not speaking of the government / state itself. I mean the people we call chinese.” (Deleted and archived.)
(Kloster’s Facebook page, which appears almost entirely blank to the public, currently features a public post (archived) of a painting of 19th century Chinese politician Lin Zexu ordering the destruction of opium. Zexu’s hardline stance against the opium trade is blamed for the Opium War. Kloster’s intent isn’t clear.)
But Kloster does appear quite clear on one point—he’s a “raging misogynist.”
Quoting a Feb. 9, 2022, tweet that offered analysis on why certain women are attracted to men who self-identify as involuntarily celibate, Kloster wrote, “Opposite for me. Need a tiny baby to dress up like a doll, come home, take off blood soaked clothes, have a tea party.” (Deleted and archived.) That one drew a response of “sometimes you scare me,” which Kloster “liked,” then unliked after The Daily Beast reached out.
“Wait I’m unsure, is this two pills for one woman or two women,” he wrote in a March 8 reply to a tweet giving viewers a choice of two from a multi-colored array of hypothetical pills that would transform a woman into archetypes like “high follower health slut,” “arthoe ketamine and anal,” and “fat Latina [with] nice family.” (Archived.)
“There needs to be a male version but you can’t do it,” he added. (Archived.)
In a Feb. 16 reply to a woman who wrote, “I told my [boyfriend] I wouldn’t bake him cookies, so he took 2 shots of whiskey and is listening to sad country music,” Kloster posted, “Bake the cookies damn what kind of woman are you.” (Deleted and archived.)
On Feb 14, Kloster was apparently seduced by a tweet from the official account for the “Right Stuff” conservative dating app. That tweet read, “This Valentine’s Day, make a vow to stop dating annoying liberals.”
“Damn that rules out literally all women,” Kloster quote-tweeted. (Deleted and archived.)
In 2017, Kloster downplayed a Jewish woman’s complaint that she’d been doxxed and the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer had put a bullseye on a photo of her. “We’ve all received weird calls,” Kloster’s tweet said. (Previously deleted, but a screenshot is still up here.)
Kloster—perhaps unsurprisingly, given his position with Gaetz—is also a committed 2020 election denier.
In Sept. 2021, the Associated Press reported that Kloster had been hired into a taxpayer-funded election investigation in Wisconsin. The report said that Kloster’s involvement, coming as it did on the heels of his Trump appointments, was “likely to increase skepticism about the legitimacy and fairness of the probe.”
The AP also noted that after they reached out for comment, Kloster “deleted nearly all of the tweets on his Twitter account.”
The previous month, Kloster had taken to Twitter to defend the actions of former Trump Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Clark, who was central to Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s victory on Jan. 6.
Clark, Kloster wrote in a screenshotted tweet, “looks more and more like the only Trump lawyer who took zealous representation of his client seriously.”
“He’s a brilliant guy. Not a kook!” he added. “But because he’s the one Trump lawyer who tried to take issues seriously, he must be destroyed,” Kloster wrote, in criticism of the widespread reaction to news reports detailing Clark’s role in the insurrection.
(On Jan. 16, 2021—10 days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol and four days before Donald Trump left office—he posted, “Keep calm and respect the patriarchy,” according to a screenshot shared with The Daily Beast.)
On April 12, 2021, three months after Trump left office, Kloster published a Substack blog declaring that “the 2020 presidential election was stolen, fair and square. No use complaining.”
But where election denialism is still au courant with a huge swath of the GOP, just three days ago, Kloster appears to have committed a betrayal that hardly any conservatives would countenance.
He defended Joe and Hunter Biden—something that would likely put him at odds with Gaetz and the Freedom Caucusers who have vowed that an investigation into Hunter Biden would be at the top of their agenda.
“I still have an affinity for Hunter and Joe, sorry,” Kloster tweeted. “I don’t care, I just like real people.” (Archived, just in case.)
