The Church of Lyin'tology, Ctd. -- UPDATE

David Brooks decided International Worker's Day would be an excellent day to tell the world what really causes poverty (Spoiler:  According to Mr. Brooks, poverty has nothing to do with lack of money, or community investment, or jobs.  It's not deindustrialization or food deserts or shitty schools.  It's nothing to do with class or race or a war on drugs that long ago became a brand new way of ruining minority lives and communities.)

Twitter went satisfyingly ballistic and articles began pouring from the keyboards of people who could count and/or who had actually met one of The Poors at some point in the last 20 years.

Such as this

David Brooks Is Not Buying Your Excuses, Poor People.

And this.

David Brooks and the Federal Government's $14,000 Per Year Per Poor Person

Published: 01 May 2015

In the United States it's considered fine to just make crap up when talking about the government, especially when it comes to programs for poor people. That is why Ronald Reagan ran around the country telling people about the welfare queen who drove up to the welfare office every month in her new Cadillac to pick up her check.

Today, David Brooks does the welfare queen routine in his NYT column, telling readers...

And this.

David Brooks’ Baltimore column might be his dumbest of the year (We didn’t think it was possible, either)

And this:

Is there a greater hack in America than David Fucking Brooks?

And this:

Annals of derp: The poverty of poverty studies

And this:

...
And, perhaps, there will be even more of this insufferable David Brooks meeping about how this isn't about poverty and systemic abuse and racism, but about people fking on their sofas without the permission of their betters.

And this:

Why David Brooks Shouldn’t Talk About Poor People

And this:

Yes. The New York Times Is Toxic. Why Do You Ask?

And this:

David Brooks’ Really Bad Math

And while it is rewarding to see one's theories and opinions validated (if not recognized :-) by others, none of this matters much now that Mr. Brooks has transcended mere factual reality and made himself the Pope of his own Church of Lyin'tology.

And just in case you think I'm kidding about the quasi-religious shield-wall of moralizing catch phrases and revisionist history Mr. Brooks is building so that he and his cronies can continue right on running their same old scams, on the very same day that Mr. Brooks once again used his incredibly privileged and powerful position at the New York Times to take the truth out The Poors into the deep, deep woods and shoot it in the head three or four times...

...not one... not two... but three well-synchronized fawning interviews with Mr. Brooks on the subject of his Profound Spiritual Depths and Sensitivities appear in print. There was this embarassing reacharound in the Washington Post:

Interview: David Brooks on sin, Augustine and the state of his soul

This from the Religious News Service:

BONUS INTERVIEW: NYT’s David Brooks talks humility, technology, and more

And slabs of exactly the same interview from RNS which have been ground up and served as a slightly different interview in Sojourners:

Q&A: David Brooks on Character, Sin, and Rumors About His Religious Journey

The astute reader will note that whenever Mr. Brooks lectures gassily and from far, far away about the plight of The Poors, he is never shy about using his amazing moral x-ray vision to penetrate their lives and communities and pronounce judgement on these children of a lesser God.

But when it comes to the question Clarice Starling posed to serial-cannibal Hannibal Lecter --

"You see a lot, Doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don't you - why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you're afraid to."

-- it turns out that Mr. Brooks' own inner life, his own failed marriage and his own motives for all the terrible things he has said and done are none of your fucking business, thank you very much (emphasis added for your spiritual betterment):

Can you talk about the state of your faith?

I’m still not talking about it. I do think it is personal. The book has some self revelatory things. But I try to keep a limit on all aspects of my life. I only go so deep with no specifics because the book is a defense of privacy and reticence. I want to talk in general about my life but not in detail. Some things are so delicate in everybody’s lives, they should only be shared with people who you trust. You do some violence to private emotion and private thought when you reduce it to simplicities of public conversation. I was asked on NPR, and I said everything is so green and fresh, it’s particularly unsettled and particularly fragile.

And that, dear friends, is what privilege looks like.