Professional Left Podcast Episode 969: Whatever Happened To 'The American People'?

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."  --  James Baldwin

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 968: Their Loyalty Test Never Ends

"Senator McCarthy's reckless and unfounded attempt to impugn my loyalty is just one more example of his typical tactic of attempting to tie up to Communism anyone who disagrees with him."  --  Edward R. Murrow

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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.

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— 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

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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

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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