...are words no sensible person would ever hammer together into a sentence. But you good people get a sneak peek at the reason for that sentence, which we will be covering in greater length on the 1000th episode of the Professional Left Podcast on Thursday (weather permitting.)
The reason that sentence makes no sense is because anyone who has watched PBS panels for more than a minute can identify their unique set of cultural expectations. Avoid profanity. No muttering asides about what a dumbfuck so-and-so is. No reality teevee 'confessionals" after the panel where a participant can really cut loose. Always be collegial, even when your "colleague" is lying their ass off.
And above all, no shouting. Business must be conducted in the proper tone -- interactions kept within the 50 to 60 decibel "quiet conversation" range. Maybe jump it up to 65 when propping up someone's lame joke with some PBS-brand jolly laughter.
But however hard they work to sand down any differences, then pack those differences in the cotton batting of PBS-speak, there are moments more and more frequently when it's clear that the Left side of the panel would very much like to call the Right side of the panel out for being a lying sumbitch.
So this banal exchange is about as close as you're going to get to PBS News Hour panelists rasslin'.
From The PBS News Hour, June 12...
This is the exchange on PBS Friday between Mr. David Brooks and Mr. Jonathan Capehart, with emphasis added:
David Brooks: ... The Trump thing is just weird. He's just -- he appoints Bill Pulte, who's clearly not even close, within a Pacific Ocean, of being qualified for this job. And then he turns around, and to make the permanent acting, not acting, but the permanent director of DNI, Jay Clayton, who's totally like superstar level by Trump's standards.
So how does the same guy pick two people, one with such radically different qualifications? The one thing I should add is that I don't like what the Democrats are doing here. I understand you don't like Bill Pulte. I understand you think he should not have been appointed. And that, you're absolutely 100 percent correct.
But the FISA program works well. We are now -- as Speaker Johnson made the point, we're now -- we got the World Cup here. We got the Iranian thing going on. We need all the intelligence I can get. And that FISA program supplies, I'm told, half the president's daily intelligence brief.
That's a lot of information and valuable information. It's a very well-working program. And the Democrats are not repeal -- or not renewing it sort of in my view out of spite, but they're making us less safe.
The moderator then turns to Jonathan Capehart, who asks an obvious question
Jonathan Capehart: How this became the Democrats' fault is curious to me.
One -- a couple of things to keep in mind. One, even though the law has expired, it was reauthorized by a FISA court in March of 2026', this past March, which goes through March of 27. So Congress has time to come back and reauthorize it, do whatever they need to do, because it's not just Democrats who have concerns about the law. It's Republicans as well.
So I just don't think it's right to say it's all the Democrats' fault, especially when they're not even in the majority in either house.
After which the moderator, Geoff Bennett, immediately changes the subject, which is what the moderator always does whenever there is the slightest danger of David Brooks being made a fool of by someone who came armed with facts.
So, rather than pursuing the question of, hey, why the hell are you blaming Democrats when they don’t control anything, we get, "In the time that remains, David, do your Sunday night plans involve being at the White House for a UFC match, by chance?"
Ha ha ha. Potential unpleasantness averted. Collegiality restored. Audience soothed.
Trivial, right? Hardly worth mentioning, right? And I wouldn’t have mentioned it were it not for the fact that it is one more example of an unholy ritual performed over and over again on that set, involving the same people, operating according to the same assumptions.
For example, you will undoubtedly remember that, one day after one of Trump’s ICE goons murdered Rene Good in cold blood on camera, the same Messer's. Brooks and Capehart were invited to share their opinions about that murder.
And Brooks did his thing like a man dispatched from Centrist Thought HQ with a very important mission: whatever the question is, the answer must always be “both sides are basically the same kind of confused, noble, tragic souls squinting at reality through fogged-up moral lenses.”
And in this case, the prompt is not subtle. It’s a video of a woman being shot in Minnesota. A real-world, immediate, ugly, concrete thing. The sort of thing that, historically speaking, usually calls for at least a directional opinion.
Instead, Brooks doesn’t just bend over backward – he gave it the full Cirque du Soleil routine of intellectual contortion, folding himself across multiple dimensions just to avoid saying, plainly, what he thinks of what people just saw.
And you can almost hear the gears turning: how do I not take a position, but still sound like I am wisely refusing to take a position?
So he doesn’t say “I’m not taking a side.” No. That would be too simple. Too honest. Instead, he goes searching through the attic of American memory and drags down a dusty old artifact: a 1951 football game film. A filmed college football game where both teams watched it afterward and each concluded the refs had screwed them differently. Which, apparently, is now the master key to understanding modern political violence.
And the argument emerges in its full Brooksian foulness: people interpret reality through bias, everyone sees what they want to see, therefore everything is politics, therefore no interpretation is more grounded than any other, therefore the wise posture is… eternal suspended judgment.
It’s the same fucking column he’s been writing for 24 years. Different props, same stage play. Swap in Iraq, swap in Trump, swap in a shooting in Minnesota—doesn’t matter. The conclusion is always hovering in a nonexistent middle ground.
Meanwhile, sitting across from him was Jonathan Capehart, doing that very modern cable-news thing where you are professionally required to witness something grotesque and surreal and respond with PBS impassivity.
You can see the “are you hearing this shit?” energy radiating off him. The body language of someone who is one sentence away from standing up and walking off set, but is restrained by the invisible PBS leash that says: we will discuss your feelings, but only in approved tonal ranges.
And he tries to steer it back toward something resembling the actual subject. Because the question was not “what does 1951 college football teach us about epistemology.” The question was: what do you think about this shooting?
Brooks, however, has already made track for Centerville. He’s back in his seminar on the Sociology of Perception mode, concluding that all humans are basically trapped in interpretive fog banks and therefore—surprise—we should be very cautious about concluding anything at all.
Which is how you end up in that very familiar elite media cul-de-sac where:
Something happens in the real world
It is immediately translated into a meditation on perception
The meditation conveniently avoids any judgment about the thing that happened
And the absence of judgment is reframed as wisdom
And the segment lands where it always lands: in that posture of cultivated detachment that looks, from the outside, less like intellectual humility and more like refusal to face reality.
You will also remember these same people on this same stage back in August of last year. Brooks "Both Sidesed" Trump ordering Texas to gerrymander him five new congressional seats out of thin air, and Gavin Newsom fighting back with the only weapon he has.
He also bitched that "no one is marching in the streets" over this shit because apparently from the Acela corridor quiet car he can't see the millions who have been out in the streets in all kinds of weather for all kinds of marches. Or maybe he's just a legacy media troll who shoulda been given the hook 20 years ago.
You see, it’s not any one of these examples – and there are dozens more on PBS alone. Hundreds more from Brooks over the years. And hundreds of thousands more across all legacy media platforms over the decades.
It is the collective weight of all of them. The relentless repetition of variations of this one lie that has incepted that lie as an axiomatic truth in the subconscious of millions and millions of our fellow citizens.
Could There Be a Third Party for Moderates?It turns out, Americans agree on an awful lot.
