My friend, if you ever find yourself sitting
in front of the House Oversight Committee and Rep. Katie Porter pulls out her Whiteboard of Justice, please know that it is truly and deeply over for you. My friend, the truth is it never began. The minute her staff put that portable Porter board onto the little hand truck they use to cart Instruments of Truth through the halls of justice it was a wrap on you, those you associate with, and everything you've ever done. As the Good Book says, "And lo, a pale board! And the name of your overpriced prescription drug was upon it. And hell followed."
During a hearing on Wednesday, Mark Alles, the former CEO of Celgene, a pharmaceutical company, found himself staring into his opaque reflection in her pristine Whiteboard of Justice, wondering how he got here. According to Porter, he got here by jacking up the price of chemotherapy drug Revlimid without improving its efficacy, a move that Porter claimed directly enriched him by $500,000. But she didn't just claim it, she broke it all the way down with her black chisel point Marker of Truth.
"Do you know what the price of Revlimid was when it first hit the market in 2005?" Porter asked at the beginning of her questioning. Alles, testifying by videoconference, paused and in that moment his fate was sealed. Porter reached under her desk for her board and, were I Alles, I would have immediately logged out, closed my laptop, tossed it into a lake, and changed my name. When Rep. Katie Porter reaches underneath her desk I get clap-hands-level giddy like I'm in a Vegas showroom watching Celine Dion and the opening notes to "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" just started playing. Talk about reveals! Porter stays pulling out simple props with absolutely devastating applications like a brilliant civic-minded Carrot Top.
What is going on underneath that desk?! I imagine it's like Mary Poppins' bottomless travel bag: she just reaches down there and whatever she needs pops up like my dude Clippy bursting through the screen of a Word doc every time I start a letter. The whiteboard is like "Rep. Porter, looks like you're about to destroy another big pharma career. Do you want some help?" And Porter replies, "I don't need help, but you can participate," as she unsheathes her black Marker of Truth.
When Rep. Katie Porter pulls out her whiteboard, it's a wrap for you, ole boy. She's about to dry erase your dignity, babycakes. Thoughts and prayers. Porter took Alles, step-by-step, through the steady increase in Revlimid's price from $215 per pill in 2005 to $412 per pill in 2013 to $719 per pill in 2017 to $763 per pill today. At each step, she asked Alles if he recalled what the price point was in the year referenced and almost every time Alles claimed he didn't know or didn't have the figures in front of him. Now, I am not a big pharma executive and I think I can cure most of what regularly ails me with Black Elderberry, so take this with a grain of salt (it's for digestion!) but if Rep. Katie Porter called me to testify I would memorize every fact and figure in my life like I was Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich giving out her phone number. Rep. Porter would hover her Marker of Truth over the gleaming surface of her white board and ask "How much did you make babysitting in 1994" and I'd immediately reply "$9 an hour but that was too low or was it too high? I'll give it back. Here's a check."
One of the most thrilling parts of Rep. Porter's use of her white board is that it is not just a show piece; it is an essential part of a seamless choreography that includes writing figures, checking her notes, speaking clearly and decisively into her microphone. and demolishing executives who have gotten rich off of illness. I have gone on record as being opposed to politicians using props, particularly the huge poster boards they put up in press conferences like they're at a science fair for democracy. But I will give Rep. Porter a pass. She doesn't need me to give her a pass. I retract my statement. She's at my window right now holding up a whiteboard like Andrew Lincoln in Love, Actually. She's written on the board "I give myself a pass. Where's that babysitting money?"
Rep. Porter's Whiteboard of Justice goes down in the hall of fame for classroom teaching aids repurposed for larger cultural significance. That hall of fame includes Bart Simpson writing in the opening credits of The Simpsons, Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting using a blackboard to write out an equation that, as I recall, read "How about Newton's apple?" and, of course, Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures. Katherine Johnson had to climb a ladder to write on a chalkboard the size of a vacation cottage and she did it so that you could go to space. Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson had to get on a stationary elliptical to do math. Have you ever, in your life, done so much math it could double as wallpaper? Taraji P. Henson did so much math that Kevin Costner had no choice but to take a baseball bat and go Field of Dreams on a bathroom sign. That's how much math she did. When Taraji P. Henson starts climbing that chalkboard ladder to the moon in Hidden Figures, I start screaming in the movie theater like all the Avengers just came back through the little space drains. I completely lose it. That is the number two classroom teaching aid moment. Number one is every time Rep. Katie Porter reaches under her desk to bring the thunder.
Remember in college when a professor in a lecture hall would be teaching so hard that they had to pull out the board behind the board. You'd be like, "Oh, I am going to learn learn. I see. Let me fire up this TI-83 and put my back into it." I hear tell that whiteboards have been replaced in a lot of classrooms by something called Smart Boards. What are these kids doing on these Smart Boards? Pokemon Go to the Polls? Back in my day, we had chalk boards. There was dust everywhere. You had to go outside to clap the erasers together and we fought for the privilege of the job like it was a treat. (TikTok had not been invented and so we found leisure where we could. Like the pioneers!) Every once in a while you'd have a teacher who would end every day with a sleeve absolutely caked with chalk dust like they were prepared for an Olympic gymnastics routine. When they really had a day of putting their foot in the lessons, the dust would be on their pants or skirt, too. You'd catch them getting into their cars at the end of the day, 100% covered in white dust like a Scarface Halloween costume, and you had no choice but to respect the hustle while wondering about what was going on in their laundry machine's filtration system. Chalk marks were a sign of effort. You'd be like, "Oh, you educated the hell out of those young minds today, Sister Mary Clarence! You elucidated the theorems for the gods and et cetera!"
Why am I talking about this when the subject is whiteboards? Because the youth need to know. When I pull out my lil portable Porter board, the only lesson I'm giving is called "How Things Used to Be and No They Weren't Better." Meanwhile, Rep. Porter is in Washington, D.C. absolutely schooling millionaires with a board that cost $30 and a $1.71 and apparently no eraser. Rep. Porter's like "we doing justice today; I'll use my hand." Oh! I have to go. Rep. Porter just showed up with a whiteboard and there's a figure on it I don't remember. It is over for me, friends, and honestly, I'm glad.