David Brooks: Insipid, Ridiculous, Toxic and Eternal.

Do you like cilantro?  

I don't like cilantro.  I'm one of those people who are genetically wired to register "soap" when I taste cilantro.   Yes, I know.  I suffer terribly.  

But some people love it.  They add it to everything.  Whatever the dish it -- fish, pizza, mashed potatoes, oatmeal, Aunt Hattie's 90th birthday cake -- in goes the cilantro.  They can't get enough of that soapy ass devil's weed.  

And some of them assume that, if it tastes foul to you, well, you probably just had one bad experience and you know what, it probably wasn't even cilantro's fault!  Or perhaps you just don't understand cilantro, man.  Like on a deep, spiritual level.  

Either way, the solution is to keep trying it until you see the light.  

Or maybe the problem is that you're slow; maybe they haven't explained the glories of cilantro simply enough or a sufficient number of times for you to get it yet.  

Yeah.  Maybe repetition is the key.  Maybe the problem isn't that they've used too much cilantro, but too little.  Maybe adding it to fish and pizza and mashed potatoes and oatmeal and Aunt Hattie's 90th birthday cake wasn't enough to persuade you of its subtle majesty.   Maybe they need to throw every other spice away.  Put it in coffee.  In fried chicken.  In Coke.  

If only there were some way to make it universal...  

If we could all live, united, in a great Cilantroverse...

If you would just relax.  

Sleep. 

Let the pods do their work.

Then you would awake in a world where you will finally understand the glories of cilantro.

Nope.  Still tastes nasty.  

And thus we arrive, at last, at the January 9, 2026 New York Times column by Mr. David Brooks.  Which is, by my count, 1,507th column since he began his tenure at the at the Times in which he has ham-fistedly shoved his Both Siderist cilantro down his reader's throats...if that cilantro were ideological hemlock. 

Date, time, subject -- none of that matters.  This is literally the only thing Brooks writes about.  Or, more accurately, this is the only thing the Sulzberger family pays him to write about  The only thing The Atlantic pays him to write about.  The only thing PBS and NPR book him on to talk about.  

Two days ago, federal ICE goons carried out the cold-blooded, state-sanctioned murder of a woman named Renee Nicole Good on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Since many citizens were filming this from several different angles, the facts are not in doubt: it was murder, pure and simple.

And before the body was cold, the Trump administration lies were flying thick and fast.   

DHS posted their lies on social media.  They posted that she was a violent rioter who weaponized her vehicle.  That was a lie.  That she attempted to run over law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.  That was a lie.  That the ICE officer fired defensive shots save his own life and that of his fellow officers. That was a lie. That multiple ICE officers were hurt.  That was a lie.  

And finally, who does the fascist regime blame for their public execution of an innocent American citizen to blame for all of this?  "Sanctuary politicians" who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement.  

All of it is a lie. 

And then of course, Trump himself began lying about it, calling her a "professional agitator", driving the car in very disorderly, obstructing way who then "violently, willfully, and viciously" ran over the ICE Officer. It's hard to believe that he's even alive!  But he's now recovering in the hospital. 

And who is to blame?  It’s the Radical Left!

All lies.  Every bit of it.

On Fox News, Jesse Watters highlighted that Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by ICE, had "pronouns in her bio".  Fox News as usual is stunted whenever a victim of these kind of incidents is a white person.  They lose much of their vocabulary. 

And as this terrifying moment in American history was unfolding in real time, what did Mr. Brooks choose to write about?   

Take a wild fucking guess.  

The problem is that the populists on left and right [in the work of fiction Brooks is referencing] are disgusted by the social order and values Rustin embodies, and they tear it down...

That order and those restraints are now being destroyed. People on both left and right decided that the old neoliberal order was a hypocritical pose elites had adopted to mask their own lust for domination...

Brooks then blats on for several paragraphs about “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.” 

The children of darkness have advantages in their struggle against the children of light. They know what they want and don’t have to worry about nuance. It’s easier to destroy a social order than to build one. They capitalize on an elemental human reality: Humans fear death and their own insignificance. They compensate for their fears of insignificance by asserting their pride, by seeking power and control, if only vicariously through some strongman.

And who exactly are the Children of Darkness?

The left progressives and the right populists who seek to tear down the neoliberal order are being shortsighted — idiotic, frankly.

Every example of malice, intolerance, ideological arson and open fascism Brooks cites -- every single one -- is drawn from the Right.  And yet because Brooks is so utterly hollow -- a bespectacled wraith so in love with his dead and discredited ideology that, for 22 years, he has used his New York Times column to prop up its corpse and wave its arms around --  all he can think to write about at this game-changing moment in American history is what a rough time Awesome Moderates are having because of the Extremes on Both Sides.   

Because, as I noted a few paragraphs back, that is literally all Brooks ever writes about.  

This is from me, back in 2010 ("How To Write a David Brooks Column"), telling any "Young Writer out there exactly how you too can learn to write a New York Times Opinion Page Editorial just like America's Last Reasonable Conservative, David Brooks!"

In just 10 Easy Steps you'll be punditting like a pro!

1) Pick a subject. Any subject. From Tasseled Loafers to Torture, it literally does not matter.

2) Quote extensively from one person or group on the subject. It's OK to just more-or-less copy and paste in big hunks of what whatever-you-happen-to-be-reading-at-the-moment to flesh out your 800-word column. Here at the Times we call that "research"!

3) Quote from some other person or group on the same subject who appears to hold a different opinion. If no actual opposition exists, just put on your Magic Green Jacket and invent an opposing opinion.

4) Although such is not the case with today's subject, as often as possible, try to impute these fictional distinctions to the different hemispheres of the political Universe. So no matter how bigoted, reckless or just bugfuck crazy the Right behaves, you just go right ahead and blandly assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the Left is equally and oppositely bad in exactly the same qualities and quantities. Here at the Times we call that "seriousness"!

5) Discover in your final paragraph or two that -- amazingly! -- the precise midpoint between those two completely artificial positions on an imaginary spectrum just happens to be exactly the Right and Reasonable answer!

Oh boy!

6) Rinse and repeat. No matter what the subject, no matter how false or bizarre the equivalence, just rinse and repeat. Twice a week.

7) Every week.

8) Year.

9) After year.

10) After year.

Long ago this stopped being a "style", and started being a fetish, Mr. Brooks

And now?  15 years later?  Living under a lawless, murderous, fascist regime spawned and midwifed into existence by David Brooks' Republican party and David Brooks' conservative movement?

He's still at it.

Every week.

Year.

After year.

After year.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 959: The 16th Anniversary Show

"All cruelty springs from weakness." --  Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 958: MAGA Flip Flops On 'Forever Wars For Oil'

"War is a racket." --  Smedley D. Butler, retired United States Marine Corps major general and two-time Medal of Honor recipient

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The Piece President

Burn The Lifeboats

All The World's a MAGA Stage...

And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man 

in his time 

plays 

many

 

parts...

(Hat tip to derek guy for aggregating these.)

As I may have mentioned once or twice or several hundreds time before, they are all reprogrammable meatbags.   No point debating them or arguing with them or engaging with them for any reason.  

In fact, this was me in May of 2005.  From a post entitled "The Black Hole where the press used to be".  

For those of you doing the math at home, that was going on 26 21years ago,

And page-by-page it followed the same tired You-Must-Be-Shitting-Me Bush nomination playbook. Specifically, a lavish and mindless defense mounted by the infinitely reprogrammable Golem of the Religious Right: that Reliable Fucktard Militia, trained to hold themselves ferociously blind to facts of any kind – no matter how staggering -- that might conflict with the pronouncements of Dear Leader. Always painting anyone standing in their Shining Path as Christ-hating traitors at 100,000 decibels.

And as long as we've taken a swerve down memory lane, this is me from November of 2005:

These reprogrammable pinheads get their “facts” from Limbaugh, Hannity and Coulter…and fall apart like Santorum when asked to name Just One of these fiendish Liberal Overlords, and point to Just One of their “lies”. Where is the Liberal Fox News? Where is the Progressive CNN? The Lefty Hate Radio to balance out twenty years of Rightwing AM lies?

And to any student of modern history, doesn't this all sound frighteningly familiar?

The Christopaths believe we are living in the End Times, under siege on all sides by the forces of Darkness, and the Republican Party is the anointed agent of The Lord.

The bigots believe they are at war. That the Negroes and the Jews are in league with the Commie Liberals to steal their jobs and their country. That their glorious Jim Crow Nation can rise once again, and the Republican Party is the place where that Segregationist Reformation can begin.

The oligarchs laugh and laugh and fund the whole filthy mess so they can loot the Earth unmolested.

There is considerable overlap between these factions, but each of them have each been steeping in their own wholly delusional and poisonous mythology for so long that in a very real sense they are not capable to recognizing reality.

Even when reality comes home in body bags.

The burning Right Wing lust for Fascism – for a White Christian Military Strongman who will brutally enforce Fundamentalist ideals of Order and Decency by any means necessary -- has made more inroads, faster, under George Bush than I ever thought would happen in my lifetime and, no, it hasn’t arrived with jackboots and swastikas. It never will. As Huey Long famously said, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag."

It will come swaggering across the deck of an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, looking straight into the cameras, and lying to the American Public.

But none of it is possible without the Moderates. Those I referred to as our own version of the Good German. Men and women who aid and abet and go along with it all because they want their fucking tax cuts and, in the end, they’d rather Rule in Hell than Serve in Heaven...

Never, ever let a Never Trumper lie to you that the base of their party went spontaneously fascist five minutes ago and that no one could have predicted it. 

Burn The Lifeboats

MAGA is a Genre

You want to know why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are?

Well, because I like you, I'll tell you.  And I do this in the full knowledge that none of this secret intel will leak to the savvy people because the savvy people do not read Liberal blogs.

Ready?

Ok...but first we have do a thing.  What the kids call a side-quest.  

You love Westerns, right?  Anyway, I do, so there we are. 

So, Westerns.  What defines a Western?  Well, even if you're not a professional deconstructor of films, if you watch enough Westerns from every era, you can see clear themes and commonalities, some of which remain fairly constant across time, and others which change and morph into something else entirely.  

For example, in early Westerns, the heroes and villains were mostly two-dimensional.  Often literally White Hats versus Black Hats.  Or White Hats versus The Savages.  But over time this changes.  For example, John Ford's landmark 1939 Western Stagecoach (The Canterbury Tales with Stetsons) is all about inverting social hierarchies, with John Wayne's Ringo Kid and Claire Trevor's Dallas characters -- the Outlaw and the Prostitute -- emerging as the heroes of the tale.

30 years later, in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the recognizable tropes of the Western were mostly still there -- heroes, villains, hats, horses, guns, saloons, etc. -- but their meanings had all been scrambled.    The villain was no longer the Savages or the Black Hats, it was the crippled railroad baron.  The Black Hat gunslinger was now reduced to the status of a hireling: the henchman of capitalism.  

To make the point absolutely clear -- that this was about the closing of the frontier and the end of the traditional Western -- Leone hired iconic American good guy actor Henry Fonda to play Frank, the murderous, amoral tool of capitalism.   

And sticking with Once Upon a Time in the West for just one more minute, the opening scene does what all great opening scenes do: it sets the tone for the rest of the tale.   In Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, the entire story is about a train that's due to arrive at...when?  When?  Don't go simple on me now, it's the title of the movie.  Four bad men -- Frank Miller and his backup singers -- are due to arrive in town at noon and they are out for revenge.  Everyone in town knows it,  and as the fateful hour approaches (the director keeps the audience apprised of the time by placing clocks in nearly every scene) the townspeople slowly desert their sheriff, leaving him to face the four bad men all alone.

Then, at last, the clocks strike twelve.

Once Upon a Time in the West completely inverts this.  Instead of an arrival by train being the event towards which all plot lines are moving, Once Upon a Time in the West starts with an arrival by train.

Instead of four bad men getting off the train and marching into town to hunt down the hero, three bad men are waiting at the train for the hero to arrive.  

To drive home the point that this movie was to be the end of the Western, Leone originally wanted the stars of his Dollars Trilogy --  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach -- to play the three gunmen.  But they declined, so Leone cast Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Al Mulock instead.

At this point I was going to go on a long thing about how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, but this isn't a movie review post, and if you didn't already know how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, well, I just feel sorry for you is all.

Obviously Once Upon a Time in the West wasn't the end of the Western genre, because the archetypes the genre developed are too sturdy and too firmly rooted in human nature to disappear.  And so, every year or two, someone comes along to mix and match the same elements in different way.  In Silverado you find a classic Western done very well, even ending in a gunfight in the street with the church behind our hero.  In Lonesome Dove, a sweeping epic.   In Quigley Down Under you get the Western in Australia.  In No Country For Old Men, you get the Western in the West Texas of 1980 because the Coen brothers love Westerns.

Is Unforgiven a Western?  Obviously.  But is Firefly a Western?  You bet.  It's whatchacall a "neo-Western", but c'mon.  

Is Justified?  Damn right it is.  

So what is all of this to do with Republicans and their MAGA headgear?

Well, since you asked, getting back to explaining why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are... don't go simple on me now, because it's the title of this post.   

MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a genre.  MAGA is a vibe.  

Which is why, when the savvy crowd sees Republican voters appear to casually and completely reverse what they swore were their bedrock beliefs (and then do it again... and again) the savvy crowd are flummoxed.   They have no theory to fit the facts, because they had always taken as gospel that what Republican mopes say they believe on any given day was something akin the hammer throw at a track and field event: momentum is built up, then released, and the hammer follows a straight tangent line from the point of that release.

But Republican voters do not behave that way.  At all.  Because the policies they'll swear by on a Monday because Sean Hannity said so... and then drop like first period French on Wednesday because Sean Hannity said so...are just props.   Just plot devices.  

This is why MAGA mopes not only don't give a shit that Trump lies constantly, they're thrilled by it.  Since, in the MAGA genre, everything is treated as a plot device that either advances the MAGA narrative, or threatens it, who cares whether an individual story element is true or not?

Now for a quick bit of genre hopping.  

You love Film Noir, right?  Well anyway, I do, so here we are again. When Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep, his writing team couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor.  So Hawks fired off a telegram to the author of the original novel, Raymond Chandler, asking him to clarify.  Here was their exchange.

Hawks:  "Who killed the chauffeur?" 

Chandler: "Dammit, I don't know either."

Even though the murder of Owen Taylor is central to the plot, Chandler didn't know or care who killed him because that wasn't the point of the novel. The Big Sleep is about atmosphere and characterization, not nailing down every detail, and since it didn't really matter who offed the chauffeur, Chandler didn't bother with it.  

From the MAGA perspective, asking whether or not this is true...

... or this is true ...

Trump repeats false claims that children are undergoing transgender surgery during the school day

Trump’s remarks escalated conservatives’ claims that educators are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender.

...or this is true ...

Trump:  “It’s a tremendous difference... We’re going to get the drug prices down… Not 30 or 40 percent… No, we’re going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent — numbers that are not even thought to be achievable… and it will be, you know, serious. It will be numbers that nobody can even imagine.”

... or the 10,000 other lies Trump has spewed are true is irrelevant.

As irrelevant as who killed Owen Taylor.   

Because all those lies are just plot devices designed to advance the MAGA narrative.  

Ergo understanding which way the MAGA mob will jump next is not (and never had been) a matter of sifting through the mountain of self-contradicting bullshit that constitutes MAGA dogma.   This is what the savvy crowd always gets wrong.  

Understanding the wild oscillations of MAGA dogma only makes sense when you understand the Republicans mythos being served by those lies: a mythos that long pre-dates the rise of Trump. 

And it's really pretty simple.  As simple as the earliest Westerns.  Their world is a world of Black Hats and White Hats.  They -- white Conservative Christian nationalists and their fellow travelers-- are the White Hats and pretty much everyone else are the Black Hats.  

They're the real Americas.  They are "righteous" in the original meaning of that word: just, upright, and in accord with divine law.  And since, to MAGA, this is all self-evident -- that they and only they are properly aligned with God's moral order -- then it follows that whatever they feel to be true and good must be true and good.

Instead of "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think therefore I am" -- the MAGA way is (pardon the rough Latin translation) "Sentio ergo est" -- "I feel therefore it is".  

It's a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking, where faith doesn't merely beat facts all day long, but facts that conflict with the One True Faith are the darkest heresy.  Something to be rooted out and destroyed. 

For decades Conservative media and Republican politicians have been making fortunes and winning elections reinforcing this mythos by feeding the base an endless supply of Black Hats to hate and vote against.  Liberals.  Mouthy women.  Brown people who don't know their place.  Urbanites.  The gays.  Immigrants.  Unions.  Trans people.  Pointy-headed intellectuals.  Government employees.  Hollywood.  "Rootless cosmopolitans".  Socialists.  You know the drill.  

And once the base came to accept as axiomatic that is was perpetually under siege by the Black Hats, everything became existential crisis.  Deficits were an existential crisis...then they weren't...then they were again...then they weren't again.  Every Democratic president was somehow illegitimate and also  simultaneously a feckless weakling, a jackbooted tyrant and the Worst President in History.  

Everything was a battle in a forever war for the survival of real America where the salvation of the nation was always hanging by a thread.   And gradually, the fascist "blood and soil" language that has been thrown around on Hate Radio since the 1980s -- constantly framing the press as the "enemy of the people", slandering any opposition as deranged parasites, speaking of the nation as something that needed cleansing and purification -- filtered up from the base, where it was the common tongue, and into Conservative teevee, Republican political ads, Conservative think tanks and publications and Republican politicians.  

And in that environment, what does it matter if what the Dear Leader says is true or not?  What does it matter if what fascist state media says is true or not?  Who cares if slander about eating the pets is racist bullshit?  Who cares if trans people are no threat to anyone?  The only thing that matters is the utility of the words coming out of the Dear Leader's mouth. And since us Black Hats are so dangerous -- "the face of pure evil" (Liz Cheney, 2019) -- any and all weapons and tactics are permitted.  

Which is why we can carefully pack up all our facts -- our mountains of irrefutable facts stretching back decades --  and lay them aside for another day, or for when we talk among ourselves.  Conservative media and Republican politicians worked very hard for many decades engineering a voting base for whom facts are irrelevant and anyone who tells them anything they don't want to hear is dismissed as treason and Fake News.  This how Conservative media and Republican politicians paved a road for Donald Trump to win the White House.

Did lies about Obama's birth certificate feel true to the racist Republican base?  Did lies about Somalis eating people's pets feel true to those same bigots 15 years later?  Did lies about cafeteria castrations feed the MAGA moron's hysteria about trans people?  Does the torrent of lies that Trump vomits out on a daily basis tickle MAGA's ganglia and reinforce their myths about apocalyptic struggle, heroism and destiny?  

Yes.  And in the end, to them, that's all that matters.  

Because MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a vibe.  MAGA is a genre in which it's just Black Hats versus White Hats, all day long.

And all those lies are the necessary story elements that move the plot along.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Gallows Schadenfreude (™)

Definition:  Enjoying a hearty laugh at someone else's adversity or tribulation even as you stand up there on the windy gibbet.

I was moved to coin this term when I heard -- and not for the first time -- the recently-former Republicans and MSNOW employees at The Bulwark shaking their fist at the heavens and insisting that "billionaires who care about America" need to step the fuck up and fund a new media that can push back against Conservative media and the Republican-controlled legacy media.  

Oh how carefully they avoiding saying that Liberal billionaires need to step up and fund a genuinely Liberal media.  

From a December 31, 2025 Bulwark podcast:  

Sarah Longwell:  What do we do about an entirely consolidated media system that has been built around Trump's allies? 

Jonathan Last (with a smirk):  Why Sarah, what do we do? 

Longwell:  We have to build new things. We have to be the ones, like, where are the patriotic billionaires?  Like, Bezos acted like a patriotic billionaire and then sold out to Trump and gave him the [Washington] Post. The [Washington] Post is a shell of itself. We're going to have to build entirely new media ecosystems and billionaires who care about America are going to have to step up and start helping to both build and and bring back these media. 

Tim Miller:  We probably need to regulate them too. 

As most of you know, Liberals have been writing about the awfulness of the legacy media forever -- shouting it from our little blogs for more than 20 years, and talking about it for decades before that.  So imagine my gallows schadenfreude when I heard these former Republicans -- who popped into existence five minutes ago and were immediately lavished with the kind of daily, unalloyed support of the "liberal" media that is beyond the wildest dreams of OG Liberal bloggers and podcasters -- suddenly noticing that the legacy media sucks, then breathlessly announcing it to the world as if they think they've just discovered radium, and then insisting that patriotic billionaire damn well need to step up and take action.  

Except based on their performance to date, if they did ever find a djinn bottle on the beach and wish for the independent media of their dreams to be conjured into existence, it's pretty clear what kind of "independent" media they would ask for.  

An awesome Sensible, Center-Right new/old media -- a retro-media, if you will -- where no one talks about the state of the GOP before Trump.  Where it would perpetually be 2013: a spiritual recreation of Sally Quinn's tight circle of parlor austerity trolls of days gone by, but this time with emojis.  Where George Will would once again be the fount of all wisdom, and David Brooks would once again be free to roam the land, concocting imaginary bright futures for an imaginary Republican party. (From Brooks in 2013)

A Second G.O.P. 

...It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It’s smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton...

The second G.O.P. wouldn’t be based on the Encroachment Story. It would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis. 

A media where, for the greater good -- 

-- Liberals who insist on writing about the Before Time or the idiocy of the new/old Brahmans of this brave, new retro-media would be kept safely away from the microphones, just as they were in days of old (both are deadlinks, so don't bother.)

BooMan weighs in:

David Brooks: Stupid as a Boiled Ham
by BooMan
Tue Jan 29th, 2013 at 09:42:45 AM EST

You knew that at one point David Brooks would suffer enough cognitive dissonance to lead him to make a permanent break with the Republican Party. That day has not yet come. Instead, because his paycheck depends on his willingness to ignore all cognitive dissonance, Brooks has today decided to advocate the creation of a second Republican Party. This party won't be based in the South or the Mormon Mountain West. It won't be completely paranoid about the ever-growing encroachment of the Nanny State. Possibly, it won't be bug-eyed nuts about Sharia Law and Latinos who behead white people in the Arizona desert...

Shakes sticks a fork in it:

The GOP isn't even honest about who they are when they're navel-gazing. Americans expect politicians to lie to us, but we expect them at least not to lie to themselves.

However, for the time being...

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 957: Happy New Year

"We twa hae paidl’d in the burn, 

Frae morning sun till dine; 

But seas between us braid hae roar’d 

Sin’ auld lang syne." --  Robert Burns

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