David Brooks' Open Letter to His Many, Many, Many Critics

Dear Sir or Madam,

Calling people out for the awful things they say and do...

You see that when denunciation is done through social media, you can destroy people without even knowing them. There’s no personal connection that allows apology and forgiveness.

You also see how once you adopt a binary tribal mentality — us/them, punk/non-punk, victim/abuser — you’ve immediately depersonalized everything. You’ve reduced complex human beings to simple good versus evil.

...leads inexorably to totalitarianism and genocide.

I’m older, so all sorts of historical alarm bells were going off — the way students denounced and effectively murdered their elders for incorrect thought during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and in Stalin’s Russia.

Once you adopt binary thinking in which people are categorized as good or evil, once you give random people the power to destroy lives without any process, you have taken a step toward the Rwandan genocide.

So just cut it out before you get everyone killed!

Yours in Opulent Humility,

David Brooks
c/o Villa Straylight

Hey speaking of call-out culture, binary tribal mentality, depersonaliztion and David Brooks, I just happen to be the owner of a video in which David Brooks is publicly chastised for all the demeaning, depersonalizing, slanderous claptrap he wrote about us Libtards back when he was loudly warpimping Bush's Iraqi Clusterfuck for The Weekly Standard.

And guess what!  The caller-outer handles herself exactly as Mr. Brooks recommends: she did it in-person, no swearing, didn't call him Evil, and offered him ample opportunity to apologize and seek forgiveness.

Let's see how that worked out shall we!

And so the lesson for today, kids, is that, whatever you may think of call-out culture in general, Mr. David Brooks is way overdue for a long, brutal and very public digital flogging.

Behold, a Tip Jar!