At The David Brooks Navel Observatory

Remember how I've mentioned 3,000 or 4,000 times that Upscale Wingnut Welfare Queen #1 -- Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times -- is one of the worst people in the world?

Well, he still is.

But first this, from John Pavlovitz, who is a "former youth pastor and author, known for his social and political writings from a liberal Christian perspective" and who many of you probably know from his blog and his @johnpavlovitz social media posts. 

I turn to John today because he frames the crisis we are facing exactly right:

This election result isn't about Dem messaging. 

Their messaging during the campaign was about helping the middle class, continuing with sound economic policies, affordable healthcare and education, the rights of women, strengthening the border, unity. 

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz formed a balanced ticket filled with character, intellect, and genuine love for this country, and they eloquently delivered their vision better beautifully.

This election result is about racism, misogyny, lack of education—and an irresponsible media that caters to those realities.

There is no messaging that can overcome prejudice and ignorance, and those two factors are the only explanation for Trump even being the nominee and getting 75 million votes. 

We need to stop pretending there is some perfect Democratic candidate or magic messaging to reach people who have abandoned objective reality and chosen to embrace their fears and phobias, while failing to do the slightest bit of work to know what candidates' policies and plans are.

The Dems didn't fail America, they just exist in a nation where far too many people don't pay attention or care to understand what's actually happening. Maybe they will now.

Brother Charlie Pierce also sums the crisis up neatly.

The problem is neither the medium nor the message. The problem lies with the people to whom the message is directed—an electorate that swings between vengeance and apathy with an occasional side trip to weaponized ignorance. And that is a problem that no politician can solve.

And three cheers for the inimitable Athenae at Dame magazine:

Democracy Is Dying in Broad Daylight

The media didn’t have to normalize and sanewash a cognitively diminished felon who ran on retribution and destruction. Or memory-hole his disastrous first term. But because they did, we are facing the most terrifying chapter in U.S. history.

 Longtime readers know that, here on this little blog in the middle of Middle America, I've been writing about this crisis in all of its aspects for going on 20 years now.  Writing about the crisis, and the increasingly aggressive legacy media campaign to pretend that the crisis is not what it manifestly is.  

And these two trends -- the accelerating derangement of the Republican base and the accelerating legacy media denialism -- run exactly parallel to each.  

They are co-dependent diseases: a sick and broken legacy media that should have been our nation's first line of defense against incipient fascism but which has been compromised by Conservatism just as a human immune system can be destroyed by a retrovirus...and the dozen, aggressive, mutating strains of Republican madness, rage and racism which swarmed in through our collapsed defenses and which stand a better than even chance of killing our democracy.

And in case all of this sounds familiar, it might be because I've been writing about it since long before Trump arrived.

American Conservatism is Democracy's Retrovirus

Back in 2008 I wrote,

It is Now 28 Years Later

and the Conservative Hate Virus that hijacked
a political party,
a religion,
and the national media
and turned them into disease vectors
still rages merrily along.

The Conservative Hate Virus that was cultivated by Nixon and went pneumonic under Reagan destroyed Conservatism decades ago and replaced it with a slowly-rotting corpse.  A shambling, gibbering, mindless thing that, for a time, served both the RNC's electoral interests and Rupert Murdoch's business interests.  It put every bitter clinger, crackpot, bigot, gun-nut, Christopath, homophobe, Klansman, brownshirt and anti-woman douchbag and anti-science glibertarian in-harness together to pull the GOP to victory and to make thugs like Rush Limbaugh very, very rich.

And the formula for turning hate into a profit-center is so damn easy!  Just wave a flag in front of their big, vacant eyes, poke 'em with a stick (ACORN!  Commies!  Sluts! Kenyan Usurper!) every few minutes, call 'em super-patriots for jerking off to Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, and point them where you want them to go.

The Conservatism Retrovirus left us open to infection from a whole suite of  opportunistic wingnut disease, and from Falwell to Limbaugh to Beck, Conservatism has permitted each of them and all of their mutant imitators to breeze past democracy's natural antibodies -- an educated electorate, an honest press, a respectful politics -- and settle in for a nice, long parasite feast...

So, now that the calamity is here -- the calamity Liberals have been warning about for decades and the legacy media has been pretending does not exist -- what tools and tricks remain in the legacy media's bag to continue deflecting attention away from the real issue which they definitely do not want to talk about...

This election result is about racism, misogyny, lack of education—and an irresponsible media that caters to those realities.

...and onto literally anything else.  

Well, way back when I was but a wee driftglass, my sainted mother imparted this bit of wisdom to me:  

"Son," she said, "the best way to blunt any discussion of practical solutions to a real-life, here-and-now crisis that you helped to create, is to use your dominant media presence to deflect everyone's attention the hell away from that clear and obvious problem and onto a debate over some sweeping, unfalsifiable sociological subject -- one which has been extant for generations, which you can claim subsumes all discussion of all human problems, which conveniently holds no one responsible for anything (society is to blame!) and which offers no solutions of any kind to the real-life, here-and-now crisis which threatens you all."

Very wise woman, my late mother was.

But how does one go about finding someone morally untenanted enough to not just fabricate a decoy issue big enough to shift attention away from the catastrophe unfolding right in front of us,  but someone who also has enough legacy media clout to disperse his chicanery everywhere all at once?

Who can be called upon in the legacy medi's hour of need to concoct and deliver a vile evangel potent enough to let the legacy media remain mercifully blind drunk on it, at least for a little while? 

Ubermensch where are you now?

Turns out he was right here all along.  It's Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times.

Except, as you know, he's no longer just "Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times."  For years he has also been Mr. David Brooks of NPR and PBS, and now that he has taken up the task of changing the legacy media conversation --

-- in the last week Brooks could be found preaching the gospel of "Blame to Ivies" on the December cover of The Atlantic.

On Morning Joe.

He is everywhere.  

Even on The Effing Bulwark, where once again we find host Tim Miller sitting as quiet and passive as a field of Martian regolith as Brooks trowels out his bullshit.     

Here's a sample of Brooks lying:

Brooks:  In my experience just covering the campaign, the kind of Trump voters who go to Trump rallies are quite different than the kind of voters -- Trump voters -- who don't go to Trump rallies.  Which is to say the Trump rally goers are into MAGA full-bore.  They want the deportations.  They want, y'know, they want the whole package.  A lot of people who voted for Trump just want to return to the economy of 2019 and they do not buy into the broader agenda...

Any statement by Brooks that includes the phrase "In my experience..."  should be handled with 11-foot long hazmat tongs, dropped into a burn bag, incinerated and it's ashes compacted into a tiny statue of P.T. Barnum which you can keep on your shelf as a permanent reminder that there is, indeed, a sucker born every minute.  Because Mr. David Brooks has a long, long history of draw colossal and wildly wrong extrapolations like this one based on literally jogging past some people in a park or some nameless working class friend who is afraid of fancy Italian meats or his third glass of overpriced, expense-account airport whiskey whispering to him that this is why the working man hates Liberals.

In 2017, this was one of Brooks' Big Predictions:

Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.

Or sometimes, when there isn't even a hint of a weak reed available from which he can hang his toxic opinions, Mr. Brooks will simply invent a completely fictional character into whose mouth Brooks can shove his own notions of what reality should be.  Or did Joey Tabula Rasa die for nothing?

You want more?  Because I've got a million of 'em.  Going back 20 years.

You wanna know why I have always kept my eye on Brooks?  

This is why.

Because David Brooks, this unremarkable grey slab of mediocrity, is the avatar for all the worst vices and mendacities of the legacy media, all wrapped up in layer after layer of unearned deference and respectability.  And because of this, he is now just about the only Conservative pundit with enough clout across all legacy media platforms to lift an entire field of extremely uncomfortable inquiry --

This election result is about racism, misogyny, lack of education—and an irresponsible media that caters to those realities.

-- and turn it 90 degrees orthogonal to that reality (from Brooks' navel-gazing in The Atlantic):

As a social ideal to guide our new meritocracy, we could do worse than opportunity pluralism. It aspires to generate not equal opportunity but maximum opportunity, a wide-enough array of pathways to suit every living soul.

Achieving that ideal will require a multifaceted strategy, starting with the basic redefinition of merit itself...

All for the sake of sparing the delicate fee-fees of the wealthy, willfully-blind shut-ins who have always underwritten his career.

Burn The Lifeboats

Make S'Mores On The Coals