Without Censorship David Brooks Would Never Have Had a Career

Here's a funny thing.  In a long and storied career of being wrong about almost everything all the time, Mr. David Brooks has never once suffered the slightest professional repercussion from inflicting his terrible, trifling opinions on the readers of The New York Times.

Don't you find that just a little bit strange?

I mean, in what other line of work can you can be an embarrassing and highly public fuck-up for decades -- where you can be objectivity awful at literally the one and only thing you were hired to do -- and keep your job at the elite, ippy-tippy top of your field?

This is not just an elite or rare phenomenon. Sixty-two percent of Americans say they are afraid to share things they believe, according to a poll for the Cato Institute. https://t.co/d8J0lOaWf1

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) July 23, 2020

In fact, quite the opposite is the case: for decades, having an unerring ear for the comforting, treacly fairy tales about life in these United States which America's academic, corporate and political elite desperately want to believe are true -- usually with catastrophic results -- has been Mr. Brooks' key to professional success.

So it does not strike me that Mr. Brooks personally spends too many sleepless nights worrying about how he is going to have to curb his tongue in the pages of The New York Times. Or on PBS.  Or on NPR.  Or on Meet the Press. 

On the other hand, in one of the great ironies of these dark times, the one thing that clearly does scare the living daylights out Mr.  Brooks -- the thing that gives him nightmare -- isn't having his work censored, but having his work remembered and widely cited.

As a writer, I can't imagine living in such mortal terror of people actually reading what I wrote and quoting it back to me that I would actively work to make sure that I never find myself in any venue where anyone might ask me any questions about something I wrote last week or last month or last year or last decades.

And yet this is exactly how the corporate media routinely wields its enormous power to protect men like David Brooks from their own shameful pasts.  Let the winds of fortune and history shift even slightly, and all the horrible shit that America's worst Havers Of Opinions said and did just a few months or years prior to advance their careers is suddenly vanishes straight down the memory hole.

"No longer operative", as Ron Ziegler, Nixon's press secretary, used to say.

Without this ongoing, savage censorship -- this coordinated, wholesale amputation of the inconvenient past -- every Conservative pundit in American and every one of their media enablers would have been fired decades ago and replaced with a broad spectrum of excellent writers from every corner of our sprawling, noble, screwed-up experiment in democracy.

And every one of them damn well knows it.

No Half Measures