David Brooks Is The Worst Journalist In America

As I noted just yesterday, the toxic cult of Beltway Bothsiderism took such a brutal, non-stop beatdown last year that the Pope of High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It himself -- Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times --  was reduced to making up staggeringly ridiculous lies (even for David Brooks) about the Obama Administration twice in one week, and hiding behind "woke activists, the angry Sanders socialists and social justice warriors"  just to keep the scam going.

So how did Mr. Brooks ring in the new year?

By wringing his hands over this (emphasis added):

...the radicalization of the Republican Party, and a new form of identity politics, especially on campus.

...
From an identity politics that emphasized our common humanity, we’ve gone to an identity politics that emphasizes having a common enemy. On campus these days, current events are often depicted as pure power struggles — oppressors acting to preserve their privilege over the virtuous oppressed.

The problem is that tribal common-enemy thinking tears a diverse nation apart.

And this:

This pattern is not just on campus. Look at the negative polarization that marks our politics. Parties, too, are no longer bound together by creeds but by enemies.

Parties.

Plural.

As I noted two and a half years ago when Mr. Brooks was beating this very same little tin drum to distract from his Republican Party's ongoing public free-fall into out-and-proud fascism --

There will always be moral fervor on campus. Right now that moral fervor is structured by those who seek the innocent purity of the vulnerable victim. Another and more mature moral fervor would be structured by the classic ideal of the worldly philosopher, by the desire to confront not hide from what you fear, but to engage the complexity of the world, and to know that sometimes the way to wisdom involves hurt feelings, tolerating difference and facing hard truths.

-- that there is something grotesquely hilarious about Mr.  David Brooks -- a powerful, incredibly privileged grown ass white male Republican pundit who lies for a living, who adamantly refuses to speak honestly about his own, well-documented history of being horribly wrong about almost everything and who confines himself to venues where no one would be rude enough to press him with any hard questions about his own sketchy moral decisions and his own ethically bankrupt writing...

...lecturing college students on their moral duty to "not hide from what you fear",  to "[face] hard truth" and to otherwise be the diametric opposite of David Brooks in every way.

On a related note, the newest Sulzberger to helm The Family Business just published his statement of principles.  So if you would like a cheap, dizzying experience like unto being hit upside the head with an empty champagne bottle from 1973, pull any ten David Brooks' New York Times columns at random from the past 14 years, lay them side-by-side with this from A.G. Sulzberger yesterday --

We will continue to give reporters the resources to dig into a single story for months at a time. We will continue to support reporters in every corner of the world as they bear witness to unfolding events, sometimes at great personal risk. We will continue to infuse our journalism with expertise by having lawyers cover law, doctors cover health and veterans cover war. We will continue to search for the most compelling ways to tell stories, from prose to virtual reality to whatever comes next. We will continue to put the fairness and accuracy of everything we publish above all else — and in the inevitable moments we fall short, we will continue to own up to our mistakes, and we’ll strive to do better.

-- and let your eyes flick back and forth between them until your vision goes gray and you pass out from cognitive dissonance. 

Behold, a Tip Jar!