How Dare Anyone Be Surprised That David Brooks is in The Epstein Files

To all of the many hundreds (thousands?) of well-wishers who helpfully filled my email in-box ... and BlueSky notifications ... and every other form of digital communication ... with the news that Mr. David Brooks is in the Epstein Files, thank you.  I genuinely appreciate it.  

To all of you wonderful people who gently suggested that I get to goin' on a post about Mr. David Brooks being in the Epstein Files right!now!, well, I already sorta wrote one.  It was a month ago, when Mr. Brooks' close personal friend, Larry Summers, abruptly and meteorically fell from grace from the Acela Corridor crowd when his creepy correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein was released to the public.  

You might have read about it.  It was, as they used to say, in all the papers.  So, to repeat what I wrote a month ago...

If, like me, to make ends meet, you've had to severely economize by letting your subscription to "Tufthunters and Toffs Quarterly" lapse, you might have missed this press release from June, 2025:

WASHINGTON — In advance of Independence Day, a group of prominent Americans, led by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers and New York Times columnist David Brooks, is coming together to provide advice and recommendations about how schools and colleges can best transmit American traditions and civic ideals to the next generation.

The group is seeking to address four related challenges:

• Social cohesion is eroding on both sides of the political spectrum. Right-wing white nationalists see some citizens as more American than others, while left-wing race essentialists undermine what we have in common as Americans...

This is perfection.  If you had paid me to write a press release about how the old, 1990s triangulation politics/"Third Way" plague ship was still afloat, still flush with unlimited funds, and still pressing its wingtips on the throat of American politics, I could not have done a better job.  

But if, like me, you still have an internet connection where you can get news -- or at least headlines -- for free, I'll bet you didn't miss headlines like these.

From The Washington Post:

After decades of power, Washington shuns Larry Summers over Epstein ties

From the Financial Times:

Lawrence Summers’ extraordinary fall from grace

From NBC:

Larry Summers' years of emails with Jeffrey Epstein roil Harvard

Harvard faculty members and students expressed unease with the correspondence between Summers and Epstein included in the House’s recent document release.

From Politico:

Larry Summers steps down from OpenAI

Politico again:

How Could Larry Summers Be So Stupid?

From Harvard Magazine:

Summers Takes Leave Amid Harvard Probe

From David Brooks' former employer, the Wall Street Journal.

How Larry Summers’s Power Delayed the Reckoning Over His Epstein Ties

The former Treasury secretary and Harvard president’s enormous network and clout kept him immune from past Jeffrey Epstein revelations. But this time was just too much.

From the Guardian, regarding David Brooks' current employer:

New York Times cuts ties with Larry Summers over Epstein emails

Publication said it will not renew former treasury secretary’s contract in latest fallout after release of emails 

And just yesterday, in the very same paper where David Brooks works:

Lawrence Summers Came Back From Scandals. Will Epstein Emails Prevent That?

The former Harvard president has come back from controversy before, but revelations in new Epstein emails are threatening his omnipresence in public life.

First of all, New York Times...

And second, am I now going to imply that just because Larry Summers' ties to Jeffrey Epstein were unceremoniously and humiliatingly dumped into public view in November of 2025, that this is the reason why his friend David Brooks (with whom he was very reverentially conjoined in June of 2025) has, just days later, fled any and all discussion of the Epstein Files like a scalded dog?

David Brooks, November 21, 2025:

The Epstein Story? Count Me Out.

Of course not.  I would never suggest that merely because of this one incident...

Hey.  Me again. Back here in mid-December, 2025.  And it turned out that it wasn't merely this one incident which prompted Mr. Brooks to haul out his oldest, most despicable and most toxic responsibility dispersion weapon -- his Both Sides Do It razor-in-the-apple -- and lob it into the middle of this grotesque and growing scandal:

I can kind of understand why Machiavellian Republicans would spew conspiracy theories. Those theories stoke cynicism, which serves Republican ends: The government can never be trusted; politicians are all liars. Cynicism causes people to check out of politics. Or, to be more precise, it causes them to care only about politics when they can destroy something. As The Economist noted in an editorial in 2019, “Cynical politicians denigrate institutions, then vandalize them.” It’s a straight line from Candace Owens to Russell Vought.

What I don’t understand is why some Democrats are hopping on this bandwagon. They may believe that the Epstein file release will somehow hurt Trump. But they are undermining public trust and sowing public cynicism in ways that make the entire progressive project impossible. They are contributing to a public atmosphere in which right-wing populism naturally thrives.

It wasn't merely the fact that his friend's involvement with the most infamous pedophile and child sex trafficker in modern history had Summers teetering up on the windy gibbet of professional, personal and legal catastrophe that had Mr. Brook hand-having the entire Epstein File scandal away as just QAnon madness, which has "taken over America" and no one except David Brooks was immune:

But the most important reason the Epstein story tops our national agenda is that the QAnon mentality has taken over America. The QAnon mentality is based on the assumption that the American elite is totally evil and that American institutions are totally corrupt. 

This was David Brooks protesting too much.  Way too much.  Perhaps possessed of a sick, sinking feeling that, sooner or later his own picture was going to crop up in the files of the most infamous pedophile and child sex trafficker in modern history.  Pictures taken at an event hosted by Epstein less than two years after was granted early release following his conviction and imprisonment in Florida for procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute.  (In addition to that, Epstein’s original plea deal itself was widely seen as extraordinarily lenient, secretive, and unfair to victims, and because it gave Epstein (and his criminal associates) special treatment unavailable to ordinary defendants. )

Perhaps the humiliating public takedown of his friend Larry Summers coupled with the chilling certainty that, sooner or later, his own page in the Epstein files would come tumbling into public view picture, prompted Brooks to use the considerable influence his New York Times credentials give him to write a whole column in which he was practically screaming that the Epstein scandal was mere QAnon nuttiness and that no sensible person should be paying it any mind.

Add to all of this the fact that Mr. David Brooks is less of a journalist in any sense of thate word and more of what the kids call a "starfucker".  Which I understand to be:

A derogatory term for a person who seeks personal advantage—status, power, money, or career advancement—by ingratiating themselves with famous, powerful, or influential people, often in a transparently opportunistic way.

Yep.  That's our Mr. Brooks. (I am now just gonna repeat what I wrote back in  November, so if you already read it, feel free to exit through the Gift Shop :-)

Among the most influential members of the media elite, there has been no more loyal handmaiden to America's most pampered and privileged oligarchs and power-brokers than David Brooks.  

Perhaps you remember when billionaire despot statue aficionado Harlan Crow got publicly crosswise  over one of his minor purchases -- Supreme Court associate justice Clarence Thomas -- it was David Brooks who rose unhesitatingly to Crow's defense, telling the PBS News Hour audience:

Brooks:  Yes, first, I should say I have been friends with Harlan Crow for about 20 years. I find him a wonderful man. He's hosted me at his home in Dallas and in New York. So, reader — viewers should know that that's my connection to Harlan.

And so that's disclosure. And that's what I wish Clarence Thomas had done in this case.

I think viewers are smart enough to know. I'm probably biased in Harlan. I really like Harlan. I think he's a wonderful guy. 

Or perhaps you remember David Brooks' Sad Bastard Divorcé years, during which Mr. "Marriage Is The Bedrock of Civilization" never told anyone he was dumping/had dumped his wife, and during which he wrote barely-sublimated Sad Bastard columns about being alone in hotels ... about working so fucking hard to make you happy, Sarah, and give you everything you ever wanted ... about buying a home that led your humble scrivener to interpret it thusly: "Something tells me that Mr. David Brooks' J-Date profile -- "Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual in America seeks 30-something exotic dancer who is into Burke, TED talks, humility and long, pointless walks right down the middle of everything" -- might not be yielding the kind of results the brochures had promised, and that he has now moved down-market to a more realistic price range."

Or perhaps you remember when lonely divorcé David Brooks went full Humbert-Humbert staring up at a dance studio full of athletic young women.  

Or perhaps you remember that during the middle of his Sad Bastard Era, perhaps to perk up their most well-known op-ed spinner of oligarch-friendly fairy tales, someone at the Times thought it would be an excellent idea to send Brooks on an all-expenses-paid $120,000 vacation so he could [checks notes] report back on what rich people do on vacation.  

The unmistakable through line of David Brooks' career is that he likes rich and powerful people.  He likes them a lot and has always aspired to be one of them.  He likes to rub elbows with them, glean exciting, insider rich-person insights from them, serve on boards with them and generally get invited past the velvet rope used to keep the hoi polloi out, and participate in rich-person stuff with them. 

And all of that and more has only been possible because David Brooks was given a column in The New York Times in which he has spent decades writing flattering fairy tales about America as his rich patrons wish it to be, rather than America as it actually is.  Which is why David Brooks has been so consistently and wildly wrong about almost everything.  And yet it clearly doesn't matter to the Sulzberger family how frequently or spectacularly Brooks shit the op-ed bed because of, well, things like this.  

Brooks:  Yes, first, I should say I have been friends with Harlan Crow for about 20 years. I find him a wonderful man. He's hosted me at his home in Dallas and in New York. So, reader — viewers should know that that's my connection to Harlan.

And so, once again, I would never suggest that merely because Lawrence Summers bellyflopped onto the hard pavement of the Epstein scandal, his friend David Brooks dismissed the whole thing as old news so let's just move along here people!

...Brooks' [November] column -- his usual buffoonish misdiagnosis of the state of American politics and his role-playing as his idea of a what a sober, sensible Democrat from an imaginary Democratic Party who lives in an imaginary America which does not exist might say and do -- can all be ignored.  The answer to why this particular asinine column exists is not to be found there: it's just pantomime for the wealthy, clueless mopes who still take David Brooks seriously.

It seems to me that the reason this "Everyone Should Shut Up About The Epstein Files Right Now!" column exists is fairly simple.  David Brooks has spent his entire adult life using every lever anyone would give him to ingratiate himself to America's wealthy and powerful elite.  Entangling himself in their causes, interests and amusements.  And, like Larry Summers, there is a very good chance that the names many of David Brooks' patrons and benefactors [or even, it turns out Brooks himself] are going to find their way into the very long string of very lurid, Epstein-related headlines over the next couple of years.

Which, for Brooks could be incredibly embarrassing.

Why Does David Brooks Still Have A Fucking Job?