Area Street Preacher Awakens From Political Coma After 45 Years: Worries About Where All This Might Be Headed

Ever since Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times got himself a new wife and decided to add "Faith and Humility Reporter For The Acela Corridor Pantograph" to his résumé, every few weeks he feels the urge to tell the people the Good News about Sweet Baby Jebus.  

And since there is no op-ed editorial policy at the Times but "Print it!", every few weeks Brooks does the journalistic equivalent of showing up at his reader's front doors with exciting pamphlets about God, n', Faith, n' Stuff that always carry that Brooks-brand whiff of disapproval that others people aren't doing it right.

To spare you a long and tedious slog through Brooks' sermonette, I'm going to jump straight to the last paragraph and ask if you can spot the gargantuan Memory Hole down which Brooks has disappeared the last 50 years of escalating Republican rage, racism, paranoia and stochastic terrorism.  It's an open book tests, so as a kind of aide-mémoire, I've highlighted the relevant passage.  

The critics of Christian nationalism sometimes argue that it is a political movement using the language and symbols of religion in order to win elections. But the events of the past week have proved that this is a genuinely religious movement and Charlie Kirk was a genuinely religious man. 

True, insofar as you're willing to call a white nationalist evangelical cult a "religion".

The problem is that unrestrained faith and unrestrained partisanship are an incredibly combustible mixture. I am one of those who fear that the powerful emotions kicked up by the martyrdom of Kirk will lead many Republicans to conclude that their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible.

This sentence could only be formed by someone who must hold themselves so willfully ignorant of the one subject that they are paid to know more about than most people that their palms will bleed.  Because that's not stigmata David: that's you using all you might to keep the inconvenient past at bay.  

It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.

 The Klan were "faithful people", and their pathetic remnants are too.  

Slave owners were "faithful people".  

The Germans who followed Hitler were "faithful people".  

And these assholes were not merely men of faith, they were preachers of hate, bigotry and division to millions of people which whom David Brooks shared a political party for most of his adult life.

   

And they were courted and feted by the modern president Brooks admires most.

Here endeth the lesson.

I Am The Liberal Media