David Brooks Raps With Today's Youth About Manners

There is so very much wrong with every sentence in the Abbie Hoffman Ruined Everything! column which Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times extruded last Friday that I am hard pressed to find place where even a less grizzled and well-credentialed Brooksologist than myself couldn't put in their thumb and pull out a plum.  To assemble such a shamboling monstrosity of a column, Mr. Brooks emptied practically the entire bag of logical fallacies and false equivalences onto page.  

At the same time I am also quite aware that this September, when Mr. Brooks celebrates his 21st year of sharting out this dreck for the House of Sulzberger, he will continue to be universally praised by the Beltway media for his wisdom, humility and savvy political acumen.  

So what's the point?  This is obviously a lost cause, right?  The ossified and insular executives and owners of the Times' (as they have so vociferously proved over the past weeks, months and years) see themselves as the high priests of the temple of the One True Faith, eternal and unchanging, so obviously asking them to change is not just ludicrous, it's heresy.   Brooks is extraordinarily well-rewarded for what he does because he is a creature of that temple, and therefore has no incentive to change.  And the entire, incestuous Beltway terrarium in which they all flourish is institutionally incapable of changing.  

So what's the point?

Let's just say I believe in evolution.  Ruthless and implacable evolution.  Organisms which are incapable of adapting to a changing environment, sooner or later go extinct.  And this is the existential mistake the entire Beltway media is currently in the process of making.   They believe they are the environment, but they're not.  They're a very delicate terrarium within a much larger environment: a terribly fragile tide pool that can only support life under very hospitable circumstances.  And although they can't see it -- or, rather, in their hubris, refuse to see it -- their extremely fragile tide pool exists at the precarious edge of a very hostile sea...and the sea level is rising.

And to see just how close the tide pool is to extinction, today we're looking at just one paragraph from one of that tide pools most exotic denizens: David Brooks.   So I'm leaving a lot of meat on the bone for other Brooksologists.

Within the boundaries of the little Times' sludge puddle which believes itself to be the entire journalistic world,  Brooks is mighty and powerful.  But outside of that sludge puddle, Brooks is puny and ridiculous and terribly vulnerable, which is why he only ever leaves it to scurry over to a similarly privileged, parochial biospheres.  Think of the likes of NPR, PBS, Meet the Press, commencement speeches at elite universities, book tour "interviews" and so forth as so many way-stations within a safe, snuggly Beltway media Habitrail which Brooks can traverse in comfort without ever coming into contact with the real world, because he knows that within it he will never be made to feel icky or asked anything even slightly problematic.  

So, here is Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times last week:

Over my career as a journalist, I’ve learned that when you’re covering a rally, pay attention not just to protesters; pay attention to all those people who would never attend and are quietly disapproving. If you were covering the protests of the late 1960s, for example, you would have learned a lot more about the coming decades by interviewing George W. Bush than you would have by interviewing one of the era’s protest celebrities like Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman was more photogenic in the moment, but Bush, and all those turned off by the protests, would turn out to be more consequential.

Let's get one thing out of the way right out of the blocks.  David Brooks is not a journalist. His various attempts at journalism -- from announcing the triumphant and completely successful end of the Iraq War in 2003, to repeatedly reporting in 2014/15 that the Republican party had gotten over that little Sarah Palin hiccup and was now completely awesome, to confidently predicting a Conservatives renaissance lurking just around the corner 187 times, to a hundred other embarrassing examples over the decades -- have been an ongoing and embarrassing failure.  

And yet he persists and he profits, because within the ever-shrinking Times' sludge puddle, his services as the Beltway media's Conservative "vibe" correspondent, and occasionally the Acela Corridor Pantograph's Faith and Humility Reporter, are highly valued for their relentless reification of the Times' Lilliputian vision of a moral universe.  

But he is not a journalist.

Which brings us to the calculated deception of Brooks' awkwardly butting his claims to superior journalistic wisdom --"Over my career as a journalist, I’ve learned...pay attention to all those people who would never attend and are quietly disapproving" -- right up against to his invocation of the1960s in the very next sentence.  The implication is clear.  He wants his readers to suspend disbelief enough to let Brooks sorta pretend he was somehow there, on the scene notebook and press credentials in-hand, so now, thanks to his "career as a journalist" you can take his word for "Why the Protests Help Trump".

Except he wasn't there.  At all.  And even if you didn't know because you knew that Brooks was five years old in 1966, you would know it because, given the hundreds of civil right marches, sit-ins, teach-ins, women's liberation marches, anti-war protests, and on and on that absolutely wall-papered the 1960s,  Brooks' plucks the names "Abbie Hoffman" and "George W. Bush".  

Are you fucking kidding me?   As examples of...what? 

Now it would be wrong, wrong, wrong of me to suggest that Mr. Brooks of The New York Times had zero pre-pubescent protest experience when, in fact, he has at least one.  From  Brooks' address to Brigham-Young University, October 22, 2019:

My life started out in unpredictable form. I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s to somewhat left-wing parents. When I was five, they took me to a Be-In, where hippies would just go to be. One of the things they did at the Be-In was set a garbage can on fire and throw their wallets into it to demonstrate their liberation from money and material things. I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can, so I broke from the crowd, reached into the fire, grabbed the money, and ran away. That was my first step over to the right.

Brooks will be 63 years old in August.  So take away 5 from 63 and you have 58.  That's how many years ago this incident, if it took place at all, happened   Hey, look at me!  Doing all the math so you won't have to!  And 58 years ago was...1966.  

This is the same year that a then 29 or 30 year-old Abbie Hoffman joined a group called the Diggers and proceeded to fuck them over.  From Wiki:

In late 1966, Hoffman met with a radical community-action group called the Diggers^[14] and studied their ideology. He later returned to New York and published a book with this knowledge.^[14] Doing so was considered a violation by the Diggers. Diggers co-founder Peter Coyote explained:

Abbie, who was a friend of mine, was always a media junky. We explained everything to those guys, and they violated everything we taught them. Abbie went back, and the first thing he did was publish a book, with his picture on it, that blew the hustle of every poor person on the Lower East Side by describing every free scam then current in New York, which were then sucked dry by disaffected kids from Scarsdale.^[15]

So that's what Hoffman was up to.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Earth, as culturally far away from Brooks' pampered, Greenwich Village life as it was possible to be, the United States was busy losing a war and its credibility in the jungles of Vietnam.  According to available statistics, by the end of 1966, American forces in Vietnam had reached 385,000 men, plus an additional 60,000 sailors stationed offshore. More than 6,000 Americans were killed that year, and 30,000 wounded.  This is from The New York Times, 37 years before they hired David Brooks away from the militantly pro-Iraq War Weekly Standard.

U.S. Casualties in Vietnam War Are Increasing Sharply in 1966

By Charles Mohr Special To the New York Times

March 3, 1966

SAIGON, March 2 In the first two months of 1966, the United States suffered more than 4,300 casualties in the Vietnamese war. American casualties for all of last year were under 7,000...

But what about Brooks' exemplar of those other Murricans?  Those patriots who scowled silently at all those potty-mouthed protesters?  What exactly was George W. Bush up to in 1966, while a five-year-old Davy Brooks was making a tidy profiting by defying his dirty hippie parents and their friends, and Abbie Hoffman was being an asshole?

Well, Duyba was born in 1946, which means in 1966 he would have been...well whaddya know!  In 1966, ol' Dubya would have been prime draft age.  Sound of wind and limb, what a fine addition he would have made to our boys fighting the communist menace in Vietnam.  After all, his daddy had done good service to the nation in WWII.  Of course, George H.W. might have been motivated to volunteer to go off and fight the Nazis because his father, Dubya's grandfather, was, y'know, a Nazi supporter (from The Guardian, September 2004) --

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy...

...but what family doesn't have a few skeletons rattling around in the attic?

The point is, the Bush family had an albeit brief history of honorable military service, and in 1966 the commies were on the march, and Dubya was a healthy young Republican man of draft age, and so, had young Davy Brooks hitched across the continent to actually interview George W. Bush at this time, what would Brooks have found?

Brooks would have found a wastrel.  The boozy, reckless scion of a wealthy political family who already had an arrest record (and not for marching for voting right in the South) and who would, it is rumored, soon go on to discover the many wonders of the coca plant.  And although Dubya was, during this period, a frat boy/playboy adrift in a sea of privilege, he was very clear about one thing.  He did not want to go to Vietnam.  And so his family pulled a few strings and... (from the Army Times):

After graduating from Yale in 1968, President George W. Bush used his family connections to allow him to enlist in the Texas Air National Guard for a six-year stint as a pilot. He did this because it became clear that President Johnson would not activate the Guard to go to Vietnam but would rely instead on the active forces to fight that bloody conflict. Therefore, it became almost impossible to get into the Guard in 1968, especially for someone like Bush who had a low score (in the 25th percentile) on the pilot test, and also had an arrest record. Moreover, in Bush’s last two years, his attendance at Guard meetings dropped off, he lost his pilot certification but, unlike most of these, he was not recalled to active duty.

So can we please dispense with Brooks' fairy tales about the shapers and events of more than half a century ago?  Historical events at which Brooks was not present and in which he played no part?   And can we dispense with them with extreme prejudice when it comes to dragging those fairy tales of times gone by into into a here-and-now discussion of protests?  

Instead, if we want that kind of analysis, perhaps it would be better getting it from, y'know, an actual expert on that period on history and not from some New York Times gleep who reports on his "vibes" about the smelly hippie 60s as if they were facts.  This is from actual journalist Michael A. Cohen a national political columnist for The Boston Globe who writes regularly on American politics and U.S. foreign policy and has previously been a columnist for the Guardian and Foreign Policy. He is also the author of American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division:

Comparisons between 1968 and 2024 are all the rage. They’re also wrong.

Vietnam was one of the pre-eminent issues on the minds of American voters. The war in Gaza doesn’t even crack the top 10.

Perhaps the most challenging thing about having written a book about the 1968 presidential election is that every time there is political violence or student protests in America, people compare those events to that ill-fated year — and they are pretty much always wrong.

Take, for example, the increasingly omnipresent talk about how the pro-Palestinian anti-war protests roiling American college campuses today bear similarity to those protests 56 years ago opposing the war in Vietnam. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., even suggested that the war in Gaza “may be Biden’s Vietnam.”

These comparisons, like all the others made over the years, are wildly off base. In 1968, there were half a million U.S. troops fighting in Southeast Asia. That year, close to 17,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam, and more than 87,000 were wounded. Moreover, there was a national draft scooping up 18-year-olds into the military, and many of those protesting on campuses were taking advantage of college deferments that ensured they wouldn’t be forced to join the army.

Today, not only does America have an all-volunteer army, but no U.S. troops are fighting in Gaza — or are at any serious risk of being deployed there. College students might be enraged about the situation in Gaza, but unlike their generational predecessors who had to worry about being sent into conflict, virtually none of them has that kind of skin in the game.

But the false comparisons to 1968 don’t end there...

There is also this from Slate:

It Was a Trap

A time-honored tactic by right-wing agitators brought on the “crisis” on American campuses. Everyone fell for it—again.

...Modern-day right-wing media have basically built their brand on the backs of left-wing students and professors, whose minor protests and marginal curricula have been consistently inflated into Major Issues by commentators eager to disparage academia and liberalism more generally. The contemporary Republican notion that America is on the brink of collapse is in large part a culture-war trope propagated by activists such as Christopher Rufo, who have spun their own willful misinterpretations of obscure academic disciplines such as critical race theory into boogeymen with which to terrify viewers and voters into thinking that their heritage is under direct attack.

So, having turned Mr. Brooks' through-a-glass-darkly (and with residual Buckley drool on it) assay of the 1960s to ash, let us now move on to judging Mr. Brooks' actual track record covering actual protests during his time as a paid political expert at the Weekly Standard and at The New York Times.   

Here, for the experienced Brooksologist, three cardinal examples leap to mind.

Let's take them in reverse chronological order, starting with the Women's March, which took place on January 21, 2017.  

It was organized to protest Trump's hateful and threatening policy positions and rhetoric.  It took place the day after Trump was inaugurated and was, at the time, the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.  Its downstream effects were profound and it is credited with getting the Democratic party back up on its feet and moving resolutely towards their resounding midterm victories in 2018.

It was a Big Fucking Deal...which Mr. Brooks dismissed as an indulgent, frivolous waste of time.  I wrote a whole thing about it here.  It's entitled "Remember When The Women's March Was an Indulgent, Frivolous Waste of Time?"  

So that was Brooks and the Women's March.  

Then there was David Brooks and the Fake Tea Party protest movement.  Remember the Fake Tea Party?  That openly racist, Republican rebranding scam that had everyone in the Beltway media oohing and aahing because this was some brand new, grass-roots, never-before-seen political movement that just spontaneously sprang up out of thin air?  

And at which those of us with an ounce of sense and no ties to the Beltway kept screaming week after week, "Hey fuckos!  This 'tea party' is just a buncha Republicans who don't wanna take responsibility for all the shit they said and did during the Dubya Administration!  It's funded by Dick Armey and the Koch brother for God' sake!"?  I wrote a whole long thing about it here.  

And then, a few years later, with the Fake Tea Party having done its job as an escape pod for Republican douchebags, practically on the same day both David Brooks and Joe Scarborough suddenly piped up and said, well whatya know!  The Tea Party was just a buncha Republicans all along!   

Yeah, that Tea Party.  

Well, in 2010 David Brooks was on Meet the Press flashing his PhD in Knowing Racism Stuff when right there, in front of God and everybody, he extrapolating from his single, jog-by observation of a Fake Tea Party Rally and a Black family reunion going on near each other that didn't result in a riot, that the Tea Baggers are the goddamn salt of the goddamn Earth.  The best kind of people.  And not at all racist!

Brooks: Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a warm Sunday afternoon.

So, that 0-for-2 when it comes to Mr. David Brooks correctly sizing up protest movement he actually witnessed with his own eyes during his career as a professional haver-of-political-opinions.

And now, at last, we get to a fan favorite.  A golden oldie.  The strange case of Mr. Joey Tabula Rasa who, according to Mr. David Brooks, was the very quintessence of "all those people who would never attend and are quietly disapproving" -- in this case the protest of which which Mr. Rasa was quietly disapproving were the anti-Iraq War protests.

The problem, of course, is the Mr. Joey Tabula Rasa did not exist.  You see, back in his Weekly Standard days, Mr. Brooks was a huge Iraq War booster and a smarmy prick of the Rich Lowry school and he openly despised all of us dirty hippies so hard you could taste in coming off the page.  But he couldn't just type "All you dirty, terrorist-loving hippies are gonna be so fucked once Bush is done turning Iraq into a branch of the American Enterprise Institute." over and over again and turning it in as a finished column.  Although frequently he did almost exactly that.

Instead, Brooks invented an imaginary lumpen college-aged lad named Joey Tabula Rasa who din' unnerstan' wut all the fussin' n' shoutin' wuz all 'bout, but knew that soldiers were awesome and protesters were privileged scum.  

Like his own little incel Golem, into Joey's mouth Brooks' stuffed his own jingoism and his own contempt for the Left, then transcribed what he thought Joey would think of the whole anti-war movement.   I've written about the Life and Times of Joey Tabula Rasa a few times.  This is a part of one such.

...to make Joey a credible muppet, Brooks' had to invent him as an unformed, uninformed, independent lad who believed what he believed because he was being swayed by the Mighty Forces of History and the Obvious Awfulness of the Left and not because Brooks' was typing up his own biases and shoving them into Joey's mouth.   As such, in  Act One of Brooks' little drama about Joey's political awakening, Brooks' describes his fictional character as someone who...

...doesn't know much about history 

...has no firm idea of what labels like liberal and conservative mean. 

...[has] been glued to the cable coverage of the war and is ready to form some opinions. 

Then we arrive at Act Two, in which Brooks' literally describes his fiction as a play -- 

Over the past months, certain facts and characters have entered his consciousness, like characters in a play he is seeing for the first time.

-- in which Joey, who "likes to think of himself as fundamentally independent"...

...sees that his country is an incredibly effective colossus...

...sees a ruling establishment that can conduct wars with incredible competence and skill.

...[sees] the people who get to do the most exciting things are not members of the meritocratic elite--Harvard and Stanford alums who start software companies. They are the regular men and women of the armed forces.

...and in which Joey learns Important Lessons about Liberals::

Joey looks at the people living in their dream palaces--the Arabists, the European elites, the Bush haters--and he knows he doesn't want to be like them. He doesn't want to be so zealous and detached from reality...

They march against the IMF and World Bank one day, and against whatever war happens to be going on the next. Joey is not sure what these people are for...

He knows that they tend to come from Hollywood and academia...

He just senses that they are cloistered worlds, removed from day-to-day reality, and he doesn't plan on spending his life there...

And in the Final Act, Brooks explains how there are millions of Joeys out there, and all of them are on the side of God, George Bush and the editorial board of the Weekly Standard, and not on the side of the faithless, Liberal scum:

Joey isn't one of a kind. There are millions of Joeys, and variations on Joey.

So that was Brooks and the Anti-Iraq War Movement.  Which means that when it comes to his opinion about protests he has actually seen, he's 0-for-3.  

And honestly, after his Joey Tabula Rasa stunt he shoulda been fired on the spot.  

But he wasn't

Instead, the House of Sulzberger hired him and he has been a faithful political eunuch at The New York Times' temple of the One True Faith for going on 21 years now.  

Which is just one year longer than I have been writing this blog.

Well how about that.   

I Am The Liberal Media