Libtards Made My Party Do Fascism! An Absurdly Long Post About The Multifarious Villainies of David Brooks

"Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.

That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing..." -- David Brook, August 21, 2025

And so begins yet another David Brooks sermon in The New York Fucking Times about how the rise of the fascist Right it is entirely the fault of you and me and all of our snooty, elitist friends.

From the same column:

Smothering progressivism produced a populist reaction that eventually descended into a nihilist surge.

And from whence does Brooks derive this sweeping theory of American political devolution?   From the same colum:

In 2018, I happened to watch the Super Bowl at a sports bar in West Virginia. President Trump was about a year into his first term, and the corporate advertising world was churning out ads with vaguely progressive messages. I watched the guys in the bar...

Yeah, pretty much the same conditions under which Brooks derived his sweeping theory about why "Americans think the economy is terrible."  

A restaurant at Newark Airport has had the last laugh after New York Times columnist David Brooks claimed to have been charged $78 for a burger and fries - but failing to mention the alcoholic drinks that made up much of his bill.

Earlier this week, Mr Brooks posted a picture of his meal at New Jersey-based 1911 Smoke House Barbeque on X, formerly Twitter, with the caption: “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.”

1911 Smoke House later clarified that “80 per cent” of Mr Brooks’ tab came from multiple shots of whisky.

But, since Brooks opened the doors of "downpour", "drenched" and "smothering" media, rather than using my mad kinesics skills to concoct agreeable theories while sipping whisky at Floyd's Thirst Parlor and stealing furtive glances at fellow patrons -- 

-- how about I just factually report on the state of the media here in the Middle of Middle America.  And seeing as how, over last several years, the Sangamon County Republican Party has hired this Murderer's Row of degenerates and liars to keynote their annual Lincoln Day Dinner and fundraiser -- Tom Homan, Kelleyanne Conway, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Jason Chaffetz,  Jeanine Pirro, Corey Lewandowski, Laura Ingraham and on and on and on -- it shall not surprise you that the media which is actually drenching and drowning Middle Murrica reflects these debased tastes.

If this is too much for you to digest in one sitting, go ahead and scroll on past.  I won't be offended, but I may use it as the basis for a 3,000 word, all-encompassing theory about human nature.

This is the OutKick blurb at OutKick:

Clay Travis is the founder of the fastest growing national multimedia platform, OutKick, that produces and distributes engaging content across sports and pop culture to millions of fans across the country. OutKick was created by Travis in 2011 and sold to the Fox Corporation in 2021. One of the most electrifying and outspoken personalities in the industry, Travis hosts OutKick The Show where he provides his unfiltered opinion on the most compelling headlines throughout sports, culture, and politics. He also makes regular appearances on FOX News Media as a contributor providing analysis on a variety of subjects ranging from sports news to the cultural landscape.

And here’s more about them.  

He and Buck Sexton host The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, a three-hour weekday conservative talk show which debuted on June 21, 2021 as the replacement of The Rush Limbaugh Show on many radio stations. 

Ah!  Ideological continuity!  So important in keeping the reprogrammable meatbags from getting all confused and cranky.

And sure enough, for decades, from 11AM - 2 PM every day, you could find Rush Limbaugh or one of his lackeys on local radio station WMAY right here in Springfield, Illinois.  But Limbaugh is dead now.  Dead and buried in what I believe may have become the largest impromptu public urinal in St. Louis, Missouri.  

So now, where once you would find Limbaugh, you can listen to the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show right here in Springfield, Illinois on WMAY.  And on any of hundreds of other radio stations across the country, because the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show is part of a national syndication package, so that hundreds of thousands of Republican base voters are all hearing the same message at the same time.

As part of that syndication package, Before them on WMAY, from 9 AM to 11 AM,  you’ll find Fox News' very own Brian Kilmeade.

After them, from 2 - 4 PM, comes The Dana Show.  That's Dana Loesch.  And after her, for three more hours, The Erick Erickson Show.

But wait!  There's more!  

Within the OutKick platform you'll find the OutKick Show with Clay Travis.  No surprise.  But you'll also find 13 other shows.  There are gambling tips.  Sports news.  Politics and culture with Tomi Lahren!  

Dan Dakich has a show called "Don't @ Me" and he is billed as "an American basketball sportscaster. He is a former player, assistant coach, interim head coach for the Indiana University Hoosiers 

American basketball player".  But here he was on Twitter yesterday. "NPR's Katherine Maher admits outlet failed to cover Hunter Biden laptop"

Then there's the Ricky Cobb show.  Here's that blurb:  "Ricky Cobb show will offer fans that magical blend of insight and humor into current sports topics along with his deep passion for sports, culture and humor from the 70’s and 80’s."  Recent topics were, let's see, "Tesla terrorists attempt to go mainstream,” and "Tim Walz Fans The Tesla and Elon Hate", "DEI officially done at Disney, are there any masculine Democrats?" 

There's Gaines for Girls With Riley Gaines.  From the blurb:  "Riley Gaines has emerged as one of the most powerful voices in the fight to save women's sports and spaces, but the fight is far from over!"

Three episodes from last year:  "She Was FAILED For Using 'Biological Woman", "Protecting the integrity of women's sports with Tommy Tuberville" and "Josh Hawley Confronts NCAA About Trans Athletes In Women's Sports"

FOX59 Sports anchor/reporter Charly Arnolt now has her own show.  Recent episodes include  "DOGE Superstar", "Have Any Woke Companies Actually Bounced Back?". "The Woke Push To Keep Men In Women’s Sports". "Canadian Sports Fans Continue To Boo The US National Anthem!", "Can Men In Women's Sports Have Enough Impact To Flip Democrats"

The latest episode of Hot Mic w/ Hutton & Withrow is "No Woke Basketball"

Fox News' Tyrus has his own place there.  Recent episode asks "Can Wrestling SAVE America From DIVISIVE Politics?!"

Then there is the Will Cain Show.  That's Fox News' Will Cain.

Are you noticing the pattern here yet? 

The lead sentence coming out of Will Cain's mouth on his show yesterday was literally, "Why are women so woke?"  

After that it was on to the "so called" war plans with lots of scowling and air quotes around everything.  Then he brought on some obscure visiting professor named Gad Saad from Northwood University who blathered on about two French philosophers who wrote books about how human reasoning didn't evolve to find the truth, but just to win arguments.  And that somehow proves that Jeffrey Goldberg clearly wrote his Atlantic article just to hurt Republicans.  

Gad Saad:

"He's not a true journalist.  He's not pursuing objective truth.  He simply wants his team to win an argument by making the other team look bad.”

For the record, Northwood University is "a private university focused on business education".  Its most popular undergraduate majors according to 2021 records were things like Business Administration and Management, Marketing/Marketing Management, Vehicle & Vehicle Parts & Accessories Marketing Operations and Sport & Fitness Administration/Management, so I have no idea what a visiting philosophy professor has to do there, except that whatever he does leaves him with enough spare time show up on The Will Cain Show when summoned.

Late breaking news from Gad Saad on Twitter -- 11:40 AM · Mar 27, 2025 "My appearance tonight on Jesse Watters is going to be rescheduled to another date."

Oh.  He's that guy!

And then we're off to, as promised and no kidding, Hegelianism.  You know, sweeping, big-word musings on what even is knowledge?  How can anyone really know anything?  All of which amounted to nothing but a job-lot of big smarty pants words from a Real Philosopher to reassure the MAGA meatheads that they’re really the smart ones and the Signal scandal is really some kinda Liberal plot against the Dear Leader.

For the record, today’s top essays at OutKick are

Some Environmentalists Could Give A Rip About The Environment by Tomi Lahren

Trump Pokes Fun At Reporter For Still Wearing A Mask by Ian Miller

Yes, Red State Voters Helped Tank 'Snow White' Box Office by Ian Miller

And do you know who advertises on OutKick?  Everybody.  In fact, I might have missed the crucial 99th Lifetime teevee episode, about Gypsy Rose, Life After Lockup if I hadn't been tooling around over there.  And this was Season 2, Episode 99:  The Unseen Footage!!!

This is the universe in which MAGA Republicans live all day, every day now.  It’s safe there.  Reassuring.  And the bargain they’ve made with their media is their eternal financial and electoral loyalty in exchange for protecting them from ever feeling stupid or wrong.  And for that reason, those people are now permanently lost to reason and unreachable, and it is a waste of time and energy to continue to try. 

From Greg Sargent at The New Republic: 

In Signalgate, Trumpworld is demonstrating exactly what's wrong with authoritarian populism: Refusal to admit error, walling out of constructive criticism and the cult-like defense of the leader at all costs...  

What most people don't realize is that, for decades, the greatest  double act in Conservative politics was Rush Limbaugh and David Brooks.   

On hundreds of radio stations across the country, Limbaugh and his imitators spent all their time pumping out the racist, misogynist, Liberal-stomping poison that Republican bigots and imbeciles craved, whipping them into a frenzy, and then aiming at the ballot box.

Limbaugh was so effective at being the Republican party's National Ward Boss Without Portfolio, that when Republicans took over both houses of congress in 1994, party leaders made a very public show of personally thanking him for the victory.  They threw him a parade.  They made him an honorary member of congress.  The invested him with the title of "Majority Maker".

And there is a straight line -- plain and clear -- from that day to this.  From the rise of Limbaugh to the election of Donald Trump.

This is how Rush Limbaugh spent his precious time on Earth..

For his part, David Brooks spent his entire career serving the Republican elite and credulous Americans of all stripes by reassuring his millions of readers that men like Limbaugh didn't really exist or were, at best, marginal political actors. 

Brooks' job was to act as America's tour guide through a sanitized, Disneyfied, Potemkin Republican party.  A happy land where the animatronic peasants spent their days rhapsodizing about the joys of supply side economics, and spent their evenings out on the porch, reading Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution In France" to the animatronic young 'uns, while their animatronic son, a strapping lad of twenty named Joey Tabula Rasa, was off with animatronic friends, earnestly pondering the question of why antiwar protesters were such ill-mannered, shouty, anti-American fools.  

You think I'm kidding?  Wrote a long thing about Joey Tabula Rasa, Brooks' Magic Patriot Dream Kinder  if you're interested.  The original text has long since vanished from history along with the rest of the now-defunct Weekly Standard archives, but since I have outlasted the Weekly Standard, selections from Rupert Murdoch's high-end Conservative rag can still be found in my archives.  

You're welcome.

The point of which is that Brooks told reassured his millions of New York Times readers, and the millions who saw him on Meet the Press nearly every week, and the hundreds who saw him on PBS every Friday, and the dozens who heard him on NPR every week...that there was no need for them to look behind the curtain.  No need to visit the political abattoir where the filthy work of revving up the Pig People to vote to cut their own economic throats because Guns, God and Gays took place.  

All was well!

Everything was fine, running smoothly and in the hands of able men and women who were steering a true course.  

And every time the public caught a glimpse of what was really going on behind the Republican electoral curtain and were horrified by it, well, Brooks had a ready answer for that too.

If the Republican monster that got out of the lab and started to stink up Brooks' fairy tales was Tom DeLay, then obviously the problem was Both Sides!  O tempora, o mores!  From David Brooks in 2006:

...

There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.

All were on display Tuesday night.

The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind.

The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.

The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people...

If the Republican monster that broke containment and started to stink up Brooks' fairy tales was the Fake Tea Party, not to worry.  Brooks went on Meet the Press, flashed his PhD in Knowing Racism Stuff, and right there, in front of God and everybody, extrapolated 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 were the goddamn salt of the goddamn Earth.  The best kind of people!  And not at all racist!

If the Republican monster that got out of the lab and started to stink up Brooks' fairy tales was Sarah Palin, not to worry.  Just a tiny glitch in the matrix that has been taken care of and everything was fine now.

The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase. 

--  David Brooks, November 5, 2014.

If you're doing the math at home, yes, this was just seven short months before Trump oozed down the escalator, slipped right past David Brooks' animatronic Republican voters and into the hearts of the actual Republican base.  And Trump did this relatively easily by speaking the the base in their native tongue: Limbaugh-ese.  Named after the #1 Republican king-maker and power broker who Brooks had spent the previous 20 years pretending either did not exist, or was just a clown to whom no Serious Person needed to pay any attention.

And speaking of Il Douche...if the Republican monster that got out of the lab and started to stink up Brooks' fairy tales was the possible nomination of Donald Trump, not to worry, because "the governing wing of the Republican Party" would soon swing into action and save them from both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz by rocketing Marco Rubio to power.

And when that failed to materialize, not to worry, because (and I'm betting you all forgot about this particular very short con)... a veritable 

...League of Extraordinary Whig Gentlemen were ready to spring into action! ("The Lincoln Caucus"):

Or they could choose the collective path.

This is the path that recognizes that the situation we’re in now is more like a parliamentary process than a presidential process. Even very small groups can have an amazing influence over big candidates who are trying to build a majority coalition. Think of the way small Israeli religious parties extract concessions from the much larger Israeli parties.

So I’m suggesting some number of delegates organize themselves into a caucus called the Lincoln Caucus. The Lincoln Caucus would not be an explicitly anti-Trump caucus or an anti-Cruz caucus. It would just be a caucus made up of delegates who are not happy with the choices currently before them.

...

Earth's mightiest imaginary Conservative heroes who would remake the GOP exactly as David Brooks wished it to be:

The first thing the Lincoln Caucus would do is plant a flag for a different style of Republicanism. Members of the caucus would remind the country that there still are Republicans who believe in prudent globalism, reform conservative ideas to lift up the working class. There are still Republicans who believe in certain standards of polite behavior in public and pragmatic compromise.

And either save the party from ruin:

This process would bring the Trump and Cruz campaigns back toward the Republican mainstream. It would create a road toward party unity after one deal or another was reached. It might go some way toward heading off a general election debacle.

It would also create a democratic path toward a Republican nominee who is not Trump or Cruz...

Mostly, members of the Lincoln Caucus would stand up for the legitimate rights of the party. In our republican system, it is parties that choose nominees; not primary voters. Parties are lasting institutions that manage coalitions, preserve historical commitments, protect us from flash-in-the-pan demagogues and impose restraints on the excessively ambitious. The Lincoln Caucus would embody these legitimate institutional responsibilities.

Or, wait out the Trumpocalypse in David Brooks' Justice League World Headquarters and emerge from the rubble to lead the survivors towards a brighter, Whiggier tomorrow: 

 If the Republican ticket gets devastated in November, members of the Lincoln Caucus could say, “We stood for something different,” and they’d be in a good position to lead the rebuilding process.

And when Brooks had piled up so much failure on top of failure on top of still more failure as to make a mountain of failure so high that its peak reached beyond the Stratosphere, the Mesosphere, the Thermosphere, and the Exosphere, Brooks coped by conjured up a new fairy tale.   Maybe Trump winning was actually a good thing because it was definitely going to usher in a New Conservative Intellectual Renaissance -- a Conservative Intellectual Renaissance so powerful and catchy that it would sweep aside stodgy oldster political thinking and by next summer all the rock and roll kids would be dancing to it in their raves and discotheques and sock hops.

Just like in Footloose!

I wrote about it at the time and you can read the whole thing here (".....And a Doughy Pantload Shall Lead Them") if you're so inclined.  This is the key passage: 

A Renaissance on the Right 

By David Brooks

What’s bad for the gavel is good for the pen. The Republican Party is in the midst of a cataclysmic transformation. But all the political turmoil is creating a burst of intellectual creativity on the right...

And who was going to lead this Imaginary Conservative Renaissance Which Was Definitely Just Around The Corner?  A bunch of toddlers you have never heard of, and...(emphasis added)

...Other conservatives are rising to defend that order, including National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who later this month comes out with his epic and debate-shifting book, “Suicide of the West.”

Yes, the field marshal of Mr. Brooks' New Conservative revolution was going to be the same shitbag who wrote "Liberal Fascism".

Because as history has shown again and again, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times still retains one fundamental characteristic common to all Conservatives, from Brooks to Donald Trump: revulsion at the idea of admitting that they are wrong which is wired into them at the metabolic level.   

In Brooks' case, only after events have very publicly pulverized one of his marquee opinions will he allow that maybe he needs to go have a lil' think on the matter.  Then he dashes out to the "country" for a minute, and returns with his initial idiocy transformed into Fresh!New!Idiocy! 

But of course, any Fresh!New!Idiocy! must be built upon the bones of the Stale!Old!Idiocy because, as I might have mentioned, all Conservatives -- from Tucker Carlson to Tom Nichols, and from Charlie Kirk to Charlie Sykes -- share a common horror at the idea that not only have they been wrong all along, but that the Left has been right about the Right all along.  

And any hint that such a heresy is treated as a monstrous aggression which cannot be allowed to stand.

Which is why, whatever treason, depravity and madness the Republican party gets up to, in the end, it must have been our fault all along.

Which is why, while David Brooks may not be the single most ubiquitous and toxic force in modern American political history, he is fucking well up on that podium.

I Am The Liberal Media