I Just Threw Up In My Mouth a Little*

The fact that it's a Guest Essay in the New York Times.

The fact that they're casting themselves as the wise and far-seeing "we" here, and apparently everyone else is the "you" that got it all wrong.  

The fact that about halfway through they haul out the hoariest and (surprise!) most New York Times-pleasing of all media lies to elevate themselves above Both Sides:

Each of the major parties has pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it.

The fact that it's the fucking Libertarians.

And the fact that it just ain't so.

Meet Anthony L. Fisher:

When I worked for Reason magazine during Trump's rise to power in 2016, I was explicitly forbidden by the editor in chief from writing about Trump's racism, or the violence and racism at his rallies. It was a "sideshow," I was told.

[image or embed]

— Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonylfisher.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 8:10 AM

Then there is this from The Daily Beast, which was cited further down the BlueSky thread:

A leading critic of “cancel culture” is being accused of canceling one of its own—for speaking out too loudly and too often against President Donald Trump.

Throughout the Trump era, Reason magazine, a digital and print publication published by the nonprofit libertarian Reason Foundation, has routinely sounded the alarm about the perceived threat posed by “cancel culture,” the modern phenomenon in which people are publicly and professionally ostracized for heterodox beliefs or remarks. The magazine has lambasted other outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Intercept for firing or pushing out key staffers whose views or actions were determined to have conflicted with their respective editorial missions.

And yet, a long-time Reason columnist and policy analyst alleges that the libertarian magazine dropped her over her vehemently anti-Trump views.

“After 15 years, the curtains came down for me at Reason today. My views, I was told, had become too out-of-step with those of the organization,” Shikha Dalmia announced Tuesday evening in a Facebook post.

“Reason has some amazing writers who do great work on a whole host [of] issues that I will continue to read and share. And it has been an honor and pleasure to work with them,” she added. “However, I had a staunch and uncompromising anti-Trump voice calling out his authoritarian tendencies unambiguously. That this made many libertarians uncomfortable raises all kinds of interesting questions about the state of the liberty movement.”

From The Cato Institute (yes, it makes me feel dirty just writing that, but onward):

What’s Donald Trump Doing at the Libertarian Party Convention?

The Libertarian Party presidential nominating convention is coming up this weekend, with Donald Trump as a featured speaker. This is apparently the first time in US history that a political party has had another party’s nominee at its own nominating convention. And what a choice!

The Libertarian Party was founded to “challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual” and to specifically run candidates for office on a platform of personal liberty, economic liberty, and a peaceful foreign policy.

Needless to say, that’s not Donald Trump’s platform, nor does it describe his actions as president...

To be clear, I do appreciate various Johnny-Come-Latelies (even the Johnny-Galt-Come-Latelies) finally arriving where Liberals have already been for decades

I appreciate it even though, when they finally got to the party, it was already far, far too late. And I appreciate it even though these same people mocked and dismissed those of us who were right all along as alarmist crackpots right up until they had their long overdue moments of clarity.

What I do not appreciate -- what I might even call vexing (if you'll pardon the salty language because I know how important "tone" is in determining whether someone is right or wrong) -- is that every new arriviste to where the Left has been all along carries with them the same overweening, self-aggrandizing, and very thirsty, psychological disorder, best summarized here by the character of Bert Cooper on Mad Men

*(H/T @airbagmoments.bsky.social on Blue Sky for the heads up)

I Am The Liberal Media

A Republic...

...if you can keep it.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 967: The Death of Nixon(‘s Maxim)

"It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom."  --  Jonathan Swift

• 
  

The Gospel According to Saint David

Sitting in a dark room, blindfolded, using only my fingertips while wearing goatskin insulated electrician's gloves, I can still find the "But the Democrats...",  "But the Liberals...",  "But the speech codes at Swarthmore..." razor in the apple of every Brooks column critiquing Trump/Republicans. 

Or, for that matter, any column of any kind on any subject dating back to good old days of George Allen and Tom Delay.

Mr. David Brooks was raised in academic privilege, loitered at the University of Chicago long enough to score a BA in history (which, based on how routinely he molests and whitewashes the past in order to advance his political agenda, should have been revoked decades ago), after which he latched onto the wingnut welfare teat like a lamprey and has been nursing at its ample bosom ever since.

Since his days misreading history at the Wall Street Journal, Brooks has been America's most ubiquitous cheerleader for the myopically wealthy, the cluelessly privileged and politically inbred, and has made his career out of telling the rich and powerful the silky lies they desperately wish to be true.

Yes, truly it can be said that in all this wide, bountiful, fatally-conflicted nation—from the mountains to the prairies and the whole rest of that song—there is no one who can speak with less forged-in-the-crucible-of-hardship authority about what hard times have to teach us than David Brooks.

I've been writing about David Brooks for over two decades now, and I didn't do all that readin' and spill all those pixels because I find anything meritorious about Mr. Brooks. Quite the opposite: I lost count of the sheer tonnage of indefensible, toxic codswallop that sharts out of this man's pen more than a decade ago.

Mr. David Brooks has made a very good living hauling water for the worst political party in modern American history. He has done it by lying about the history and direction of his Republican party. By pretending that any outward evidence of the depravity of his Republican party is merely a transient, surface nuisance. By deflecting any honest discussion of the unique, toxic madness and malice of his Republican party by relentlessly playing Both Siderist games.

Week after week, month after month, year after year, Mr. Brooks has plied his deeply dishonest and very profitable craft. Along with the rest of the conservative brain caste, he spent most of the 1990s and the early 2000s railing against us vile liberals  As long as it was popular to treat liberals like fifth columnists, David Brooks was first in line for the hippie bashing. But when it finally became impossible to ignore that the Iraq War he had cheerled was a complete disaster, that the Bush administration was staffed by morons, charlatans and zealots, and that—surprise, surprise—the liberals had been right all along, what did Brooks do?

Apologize for his journalistic malpractice?  Heaven forefend!

No, he simply became the newest and loudest cheerleader of the "Both Sides Do It" cult, claiming that the liberals were just as much to blame for the current situation as the war criminals in the White House. Thus was launched Brooks' second career as the chief evangelist of that poisonous cult of privilege and pretense.  There followed hundreds of sermons about the Sensible Center wherein resided a whole colony of sensible Republican candidates and noble Republican voters who spent their days making America with their own two hands, and their evenings reading "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" to their towheaded children. Mythical creatures that have never existed and never will.

Now that Mr. David Brooks has successfully scammed the New York Times and PBS and NPR and Yale and NBC and The Aspen Institute and Oprah into underwriting his midlife crisis, various paeans are being written about his heroic moral journey from unrepentant Beltway Republican hack to unrepentant Beltway Both Siderist hack.

The Right's now openly insane, which means the Both Sides Did It lie must be spun even harder and the Temple of Centrism even better attended. That's the Brooks patter, and he's been running it for so long that it's worn grooves in the public discourse. The only honorable way to alter the course of the storm of Republicans' madness and violence bearing down on us would be to invent a time machine and go back to when the madness began to grow and metastasize and thoroughly and publicly discredit those elite media influencers like Brooks who were swearing up, down and sideways that there was nothing to worry about.

That George W. Bush was a military genius. 

That the Iraq War was an unalloyed success. 

That tax cuts fix everything. 

That we would never have deficits again. 

That the Tea Party wasn't racist. 

That Obama was to blame for GOP intransigence. 

That everything was fine: that the GOP had gotten over being weird and was now back to being awesome. 

That Liberals are crackpot alarmists for fretting over the trajectory of the GOP. 

That Both Sides are to blame. 

That Bernie was just as bad as Trump. 

That we needn't worry about Trump because it was definitely gonna be Rubio. 

That Hillary was just as bad as Trump. 

That we needn't worry about Trump because the Wise Men of the GOP would definitely keep him in line. 

That the base of the GOP weren't racist meatheads drunk on Hate Radio and Fox News rotgut.

At at no point on this long, ugly trek did the Sulzberger family decide that David Brooks, their doddering, ideologically-incontinent housepet, has finally shit on one too many of the family's hand-knotted Bokhara rugs to be kept around any longer.  At no point did they think it was finally time to dispatch him to an Elite Pundit Farm upstate where he could frolic and opine all day long in the warm sunshine with the ghosts of fellow pundits like David Broder and William Safire?

Instead, Brooks finally packed up his medicine show and hopped the Acela corridor train for a quick ride southwest to his new digs at The Atlantic.  

Because David Brooks is never going to change, and because he's already been guest-writing at The Atlantic for years, we can safely assume that they know exactly what they're buying.  

During his tenure at the Times, Brooks job has been to provide institutional cover for the GOP's descent into madness by insisting, over and over again, that Both Sides are equally to blame for the catastrophe which one side -- and only one side -- has deliberately engineered.

That's his job. That's his racket. He's been very good at it. And now he'll be plying that same old snake under a new label.

Old whine in new skins, if you'll pardon the pun.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 966: The Persistence of Memory

"Life? Don't talk to me about life."  --  Marvin, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

• 
  

Circle of Life Redux

I'm getting a running start here by repurposing some of my prose from five years ago, because that  story has now taken a hilarious twist, so if some of this sounds familiar, bear with me. 

As some of you may remember, once upon a time, back in my Twitter day, I got myself suspended for life (without appeal)  for referring to a wingnut who stepped to me on Twitter as "trash".  Really.  That's all it took, which is wild considering the level of paint-peeling invective, disinformation, violent rhetoric and subornation of outright treason that went on unmentioned and unpunished, especially among the Bluechecks, in the Twitter sewer every hour of every day.  And, as you may have noticed, has only gotten exponentially worse.

(Note: I was later unbanned for life because I waited a year, appealed again, and apparently this time there was a different team of caffeinated thralls staffing Elmo's server room who couldn't figure out why I'd been banned in the first place.) 

Anyway, at the time one of my most dogged internet minders who delighted at my expulsion was this goof.  He was a recent Never Trumper convert from the GOP (pay particular attention because it comes up later) who took great umbrage at the fact that I wasn't lining up to kiss the Lincoln Lads' collective asses.  This was not an uncommon sentiment among many savvy Liberals at the time -- savvy Liberals who directed tons of "Shut up!  Sit down!  The enemy of my enemy is my supervisor and so forth" shit my way back when I was just about the only voice out there trying to sound the alarm.  

So I just found out Mr. Electrico has been permanently suspended from Twitter.

Probably due to his insufferable, downright hateful Never Trumper Derangement Syndrome.

Oh well.

— Isaiah L. Carter (@IsaiahLCarter) January 19, 2021

Well shortly thereafter Lincoln Lad co-founder and fake internet tough-guy, Rick Wilson, decided it was time to seize the spotlight so he saddled up his Twitter account say some objectively ridiculous shit (no, he wasn't banned for life -- this is not that story, and I don't think that )  

Rick Wilson lied for Twitter engagement good to know https://t.co/cDvBtkRsBj

— Frances Langum 🧶 (@bluegal) October 8, 2021

And it put me in minded of Mr. Carter and his umbrage and I wondered, somewhat idly, if time and tide had tempered his foolishness.  

So I asked a friend of mine with an active Twitter account to check in on him and, well...

And in 2021 that was the rest of the story.But no longer.  Because you'll never guess where 2021 anti-Trump GOP convert and Lincoln Lad fan boy finds himself in 2026.He is account has been fully restored to Twitter and now -- as a dog returns to its vomit -- he is a full-on, America First, MAGA goon, who co-hosts an adorable little show on Rumble every Sunday night and everything.  And as of this writing, this his pinned Tweet on TwitterX:

By the way, in case you are unfamiliar, that word he is using to describe Don Lemon?  "Frociaggine"?  That's a highly derogatory term for homosexual.  A final accent piece which really pulls Mr. Carter's persona together, don't you think?  Does any of this surprise me?Of course not.  And by now it shouldn't surprise you either.

The Axe Forgets

But The Tree Remembers

The Long, Slow Road Halfway to Damascus

Because I listen to various major Never Trump podcasts so you don't have to, I can reliably report back to you that almost all of them -- free or paywalled -- feature in each episode what I would call the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin.

After spending a fair chunk of time being outraged by the fascist who runs their former party, then switching back and forth at whiplashing speed yelling at Democrats for not shouting enough or shouting too much... or shutting the government down or not shutting the government down ... or too much baking soda, then not enough baking soda (I swear, it's like having picture hanging instructions barked at you by a metamorphopsia sufferer who's also drunk) then comes the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin.

In case you are unfamiliar, the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin always centers around one of the tiny number of Republican elected official out at the perimeter of the GOP who Never Trumpers thought, when nut-cuttin' time finally came, would take at least a tiny step forward and show a little of those steely Conservative principles which Never Trumpers always thought were there.

When, after yet another "Surely this time..." moment has passed and Republicans have behaved like, y'know, Republicans, and you hear Never Trumper's saying things like...

What the hell is wrong with Susan Collins?  Or

Lisa Murkowski has betrayed...  Or

I had such hopes for Bill Cassidy...  

...congratulations!  You've arrived just in time for the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin!  

And the chagrin is palpable, and yet it's repeated over and over again, every day and always with the same tone of "You mean there's no Santa Claus?!?" disbelief.   Because deep down they simply refuse to believe that they could have been this spectacularly wrong about the cause to which the devoted most of their adults lives.  

And these last 10 years (although some of us would peg it at the last +30 years)?  If they have proven anything far beyond the need to pile up even one more piece evidence, it's this.  This is not and never has been some passing fever that will break if we all keep calm and go right on treating these fuckers with civility.  There is no national epiphany at hand. No sudden burst of collective conscience where we all agree that this was evil and we should stop pretending otherwise.

Yes, the MAGA mob may disperse once they're out of power, but not to go on some contemplative nature hike where they learn important lessons about life and compassion.  Instead they'll do what they did after the Bush regime collapsed: scatter like roaches, rebrand, then rely on a complicit legacy media to tell everyone that the danger has passed and we can get back to "politics as usual" while the MAGA scum regroup.   

Because by now their rage and racism and paranoia are not affects: these are the traits that define them.  These are the building blocks of their spiritual DNA and at this late date we can no more expect them (or the puppeteers/influencers who spin them up and given them scapegoats) to change than we could expect a wood tick to become a golden retriever.  There will be no Damascene moments down the dark road they are traveling.

On the other hand, very slowly and through layers of habit and denial, Old Man Epiphany appears to be chipping and chiseling his way into the Never Trumper bubble with the bad news that, yep, it's the whole fucking party, from top to bottom.  

You still hear loose talk about how Trump, "hostile takeover" of the party, or how he  "hijacked" the party, which is nonsense.  Yes, I'm sure the handful of party elites for whom the Never Trumpers worked felt like it was a hostile takeover when the party base chucked them out in favor of the guy who talked like they talked and hated who they hated, but all Trump ever did was speak to the base in the Limbaugh language they understood, instead of disdainfully holding that Hate Radio hate speech at arm's length and act like they were better than all that.

And as for "hijacking ", as I've written on this blog many times, it's not a hijacking when they hand you the keys and beg you to drive.  Three times.

However, the Never Trumpers seem to have given up their ridiculous, Trump 1.0 fantasy of returning to a shattered Republican party as the "We told you so" caucus after Trump crashed and burned.  That somehow, the staff of the defunct Weekly Standard and a few of their fellow travelers would show up like Charles II to restore the Neocon monarchy and lead the grateful, shamefaced mob back into peonage under the same people that gave them Bush and Cheney twice, and tried to force-feed them Romney and Jeb.

They seem to have finally gotten it through their heads that things have changed.  Forever.

But however clearly they begin to see how wrong they were about their party and their movement and their former friends and colleagues, the distance between that and forcing their mouths to say the words "The Left was right about the Right all along" is incalculable.  Or at least something to be measured in light years.  Because continuing to roll their eyes at the excesses of the Left -- even when those excesses amount to nothing more than the usual media "nutpicking" -- remains the floatation device that keeps them viable.  

After all, within the legacy media, admitting out loud that, in effect, you never had any idea what was really going on inside the party you worked for your entire adult life is considered merely a venial sin.  Minor, but forgivable, since the overall media party line continues to be that nobody could have seen this coming.

But then to say out loud that the dirty hippies who they built their careers mocking and shitting on had it right all along? Are you insane? That, my friends, would be the most sure-fire way to A) make yourself as big a legacy media pariah as the dirty hippies are because the media does not want to hear that shit, and B) lose your profitable podcasting gigs, newspaper columns, book contracts and round-the-clock appearances on MSNOW as the media-anointed Leaders of the Resistance.

No, they've chosen the safest available path: indignant about the fascists who run their former party, then carping at Democrats for being too tall, but also not tall enough, and too vanilla, but also problematically not vanilla enough.

Selah.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 965: The Amnesia Machine Warms Up

"Without memory, there is no culture. 

Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future."  --  Elie Wiesel

•