David Brooks: Bisectual

From "21st Century American History:  The First Quintile -- 2001 to 2020":

...

Of course as every high-school student knows, all historical judgements regarding this era must all be weighed against the fact that almost all of the original digital and analog records of the Guild of Pundits were destroyed during the Great Discontinuity -- the early 21st century's Elite media's last ditch effort to evade accountability for their crimes. And what few fragments we do have from that time come down to us filtered through the fun-house mirrors of surviving backups of the "fuckingblogs".

However even with that strong caveat in place, and even given the fact that the debate between the "Historicals" and the "Fictionals" seems fated to rage on forever --

...

Obviously, (the Historicals conclude) like "Alan Smithee" or "Tom Freed Man", "David Brooks" must have been some sort of collective pen-name behind which dregs of the Punditry Guild could shout all kinds of shameful craziness while avoiding the professional consequences of saying remarkably stupid thing in public.

But (the Fictionals rejoin very effectively) it is the very ludicrousness of "David Brooks"'s "opinions" which argue most strongly against it being the name -- or pseudonym -- of any real person or persons.  Consider that, in order to make the argument that the United States government is incapable of competently operating a national health-care system with mandates, "David Brooks" simply ignores the fact that the United States government of that era was already operating a very efficient and beloved national health-care system (with mandates!) which was known as Medicare and, at the time, had over 49 million beneficiaries.

Fine (the Historicals say), but do you really need to yell every time you make that point?

...

-- it is the consensus opinion among all media scholars, that, whether he was real or imaginary,  "Mr. David Brooks" was almost unique among the shapers of national narrative of the time for one, simple reason: in the annals of early 21st Century Punditry, no one else on Earth commanded such influence or such princely compensation by doing what "Mr. David Brooks" did -- pull random topics out of thin air twice a week and then -- in the most detached, plodding and lifeless language available -- ritually bisecting them into one more utterly forgettable pile of "Some people say one thing and some people say something else".

For example, here are a few surviving fragments of the work product of "Mr. David Brooks", most likely from mid- to late-2014:

Some people like to keep a journal...

Some people think it’s a bad idea...
People who keep a journal often see it as part of the process of..
People who oppose journal-keeping fear it contributes to...
The problem is that the mind is vastly deep, complex and variable...
Oversimplifiers don’t really understand themselves...
We are better self-perceivers if we can create distance and see the general contours of our emergent system selves...

The "Historicals" continue to point to dozens of example like this to underscore their thesis that the obsessive, bi-weekly production of such trifling, pseudo-robotic WTF columns can be nothing less than the creation of a collective of shitty writers, each publishing under a single pen-name.

The "Fictionals" remain adamant that the sheer banality of "Mr. David Brooks" plus the way in which his banality always came encased in a doctrine of false equivalence so fetishistic as to make the rules of haiku look anarchic plus the staggering sums of money spent by so many powerful media corporations to keep "Mr. David Brooks" in front of the public all add up to some vast, subtle parody of serious journalism akin to other such comedic send-ups of the news from that period such as "The Onion", "The Daily Show" and "The Wall Street Journal".

And yet, despite their ongoing differences,"Fictionals" and "Historicals" remain united on one important:

...Historicals and Fictionals issued their famous joint statement on the Principles of Academic Exegesis (see, "The Literals? Fuck those guys!") in which they express unanimous concurrence that however shoutycrackers things became during the worst of the "Fucking Crazy Years", as tens of thousands of journalists were defrocked and hundreds of media houses were shuttered, it would have been impossible for any real writer whose output was as meager and ridiculous as "David Brooks" to have maintained a position of such influence and status at the very apex of the Punditry Guild.