Professional Left Podcast Episode 970: Lifeboats And How To Burn Them

"The Nazi regime is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination."  --Winston Churchill, June 22, 1941.

• 
  

The Gospel According to Saint David

Sitting in a dark room, blindfolded, using only my fingertips while wearing goatskin insulated electrician's gloves, I can still find the "But the Democrats...",  "But the Liberals...",  "But the speech codes at Swarthmore..." razor in the apple of every Brooks column critiquing Trump/Republicans. 

Or, for that matter, any column of any kind on any subject dating back to good old days of George Allen and Tom Delay.

Mr. David Brooks was raised in academic privilege, loitered at the University of Chicago long enough to score a BA in history (which, based on how routinely he molests and whitewashes the past in order to advance his political agenda, should have been revoked decades ago), after which he latched onto the wingnut welfare teat like a lamprey and has been nursing at its ample bosom ever since.

Since his days misreading history at the Wall Street Journal, Brooks has been America's most ubiquitous cheerleader for the myopically wealthy, the cluelessly privileged and politically inbred, and has made his career out of telling the rich and powerful the silky lies they desperately wish to be true.

Yes, truly it can be said that in all this wide, bountiful, fatally-conflicted nation—from the mountains to the prairies and the whole rest of that song—there is no one who can speak with less forged-in-the-crucible-of-hardship authority about what hard times have to teach us than David Brooks.

I've been writing about David Brooks for over two decades now, and I didn't do all that readin' and spill all those pixels because I find anything meritorious about Mr. Brooks. Quite the opposite: I lost count of the sheer tonnage of indefensible, toxic codswallop that sharts out of this man's pen more than a decade ago.

Mr. David Brooks has made a very good living hauling water for the worst political party in modern American history. He has done it by lying about the history and direction of his Republican party. By pretending that any outward evidence of the depravity of his Republican party is merely a transient, surface nuisance. By deflecting any honest discussion of the unique, toxic madness and malice of his Republican party by relentlessly playing Both Siderist games.

Week after week, month after month, year after year, Mr. Brooks has plied his deeply dishonest and very profitable craft. Along with the rest of the conservative brain caste, he spent most of the 1990s and the early 2000s railing against us vile liberals  As long as it was popular to treat liberals like fifth columnists, David Brooks was first in line for the hippie bashing. But when it finally became impossible to ignore that the Iraq War he had cheerled was a complete disaster, that the Bush administration was staffed by morons, charlatans and zealots, and that—surprise, surprise—the liberals had been right all along, what did Brooks do?

Apologize for his journalistic malpractice?  Heaven forefend!

No, he simply became the newest and loudest cheerleader of the "Both Sides Do It" cult, claiming that the liberals were just as much to blame for the current situation as the war criminals in the White House. Thus was launched Brooks' second career as the chief evangelist of that poisonous cult of privilege and pretense.  There followed hundreds of sermons about the Sensible Center wherein resided a whole colony of sensible Republican candidates and noble Republican voters who spent their days making America with their own two hands, and their evenings reading "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" to their towheaded children. Mythical creatures that have never existed and never will.

Now that Mr. David Brooks has successfully scammed the New York Times and PBS and NPR and Yale and NBC and The Aspen Institute and Oprah into underwriting his midlife crisis, various paeans are being written about his heroic moral journey from unrepentant Beltway Republican hack to unrepentant Beltway Both Siderist hack.

The Right's now openly insane, which means the Both Sides Did It lie must be spun even harder and the Temple of Centrism even better attended. That's the Brooks patter, and he's been running it for so long that it's worn grooves in the public discourse. The only honorable way to alter the course of the storm of Republicans' madness and violence bearing down on us would be to invent a time machine and go back to when the madness began to grow and metastasize and thoroughly and publicly discredit those elite media influencers like Brooks who were swearing up, down and sideways that there was nothing to worry about.

That George W. Bush was a military genius. 

That the Iraq War was an unalloyed success. 

That tax cuts fix everything. 

That we would never have deficits again. 

That the Tea Party wasn't racist. 

That Obama was to blame for GOP intransigence. 

That everything was fine: that the GOP had gotten over being weird and was now back to being awesome. 

That Liberals are crackpot alarmists for fretting over the trajectory of the GOP. 

That Both Sides are to blame. 

That Bernie was just as bad as Trump. 

That we needn't worry about Trump because it was definitely gonna be Rubio. 

That Hillary was just as bad as Trump. 

That we needn't worry about Trump because the Wise Men of the GOP would definitely keep him in line. 

That the base of the GOP weren't racist meatheads drunk on Hate Radio and Fox News rotgut.

At at no point on this long, ugly trek did the Sulzberger family decide that David Brooks, their doddering, ideologically-incontinent housepet, has finally shit on one too many of the family's hand-knotted Bokhara rugs to be kept around any longer.  At no point did they think it was finally time to dispatch him to an Elite Pundit Farm upstate where he could frolic and opine all day long in the warm sunshine with the ghosts of fellow pundits like David Broder and William Safire?

Instead, Brooks finally packed up his medicine show and hopped the Acela corridor train for a quick ride southwest to his new digs at The Atlantic.  

Because David Brooks is never going to change, and because he's already been guest-writing at The Atlantic for years, we can safely assume that they know exactly what they're buying.  

During his tenure at the Times, Brooks job has been to provide institutional cover for the GOP's descent into madness by insisting, over and over again, that Both Sides are equally to blame for the catastrophe which one side -- and only one side -- has deliberately engineered.

That's his job. That's his racket. He's been very good at it. And now he'll be plying that same old snake under a new label.

Old whine in new skins, if you'll pardon the pun.  

I Am The Liberal Media

The New York Times To Consciously Uncouple From David Brooks

But they will continue to co-parent the Both Sides Do It monster they spawned.

From The Atlantic (with emphasis added):

The Atlantic hires David Brooks as a staff writer
New home for his writing, and to launch a video podcast

The Atlantic is announcing that David Brooks, who for years has contributed memorable Atlantic cover stories and essays on political and societal issues, is joining the magazine as a staff writer beginning next month. The Atlantic will be the home for all of David’s writing, and he will also host a new weekly video podcast that will launch later this spring. David worked as an opinion columnist at The New York Times for 22 years.

In a note to staff, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes: “David’s work––his columns, his stories for us, and his many books––have made him known and acclaimed around the world. He is, among other things, America’s best pop sociologist, someone with a reporter’s curiosity and a writer’s grace. He is an unparalleled diagnostician of the faults and weaknesses of governments, institutions, and social structures, as our readers know from such stories as...

Yadda, Yadda, Yadda. 

I, for one, cannot wait for the avalanche of saccharine legacy media encomiums. 

It's rumored that David Broder himself will rise from the grave to give a toast at Brook's farewell gala.  

Then there's this:

Never doubt that there is a Club kids.

And never doubt that none of us will ever be members.

I Am The Liberal Media

David Brooks: Insipid, Ridiculous, Toxic and Eternal.

Do you like cilantro?  

I don't like cilantro.  I'm one of those people who are genetically wired to register "soap" when I taste cilantro.   Yes, I know.  I suffer terribly.  

But some people love it.  They add it to everything.  Whatever the dish it -- fish, pizza, mashed potatoes, oatmeal, Aunt Hattie's 90th birthday cake -- in goes the cilantro.  They can't get enough of that soapy ass devil's weed.  

And some of them assume that, if it tastes foul to you, well, you probably just had one bad experience and you know what, it probably wasn't even cilantro's fault!  Or perhaps you just don't understand cilantro, man.  Like on a deep, spiritual level.  

Either way, the solution is to keep trying it until you see the light.  

Or maybe the problem is that you're slow; maybe they haven't explained the glories of cilantro simply enough or a sufficient number of times for you to get it yet.  

Yeah.  Maybe repetition is the key.  Maybe the problem isn't that they've used too much cilantro, but too little.  Maybe adding it to fish and pizza and mashed potatoes and oatmeal and Aunt Hattie's 90th birthday cake wasn't enough to persuade you of its subtle majesty.   Maybe they need to throw every other spice away.  Put it in coffee.  In fried chicken.  In Coke.  

If only there were some way to make it universal...  

If we could all live, united, in a great Cilantroverse...

If you would just relax.  

Sleep. 

Let the pods do their work.

Then you would awake in a world where you will finally understand the glories of cilantro.

Nope.  Still tastes nasty.  

And thus we arrive, at last, at the January 9, 2026 New York Times column by Mr. David Brooks.  Which is, by my count, 1,507th column since he began his tenure at the at the Times in which he has ham-fistedly shoved his Both Siderist cilantro down his reader's throats...if that cilantro were ideological hemlock. 

Date, time, subject -- none of that matters.  This is literally the only thing Brooks writes about.  Or, more accurately, this is the only thing the Sulzberger family pays him to write about  The only thing The Atlantic pays him to write about.  The only thing PBS and NPR book him on to talk about.  

Two days ago, federal ICE goons carried out the cold-blooded, state-sanctioned murder of a woman named Renee Nicole Good on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Since many citizens were filming this from several different angles, the facts are not in doubt: it was murder, pure and simple.

And before the body was cold, the Trump administration lies were flying thick and fast.   

DHS posted their lies on social media.  They posted that she was a violent rioter who weaponized her vehicle.  That was a lie.  That she attempted to run over law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.  That was a lie.  That the ICE officer fired defensive shots save his own life and that of his fellow officers. That was a lie. That multiple ICE officers were hurt.  That was a lie.  

And finally, who does the fascist regime blame for their public execution of an innocent American citizen to blame for all of this?  "Sanctuary politicians" who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement.  

All of it is a lie. 

And then of course, Trump himself began lying about it, calling her a "professional agitator", driving the car in very disorderly, obstructing way who then "violently, willfully, and viciously" ran over the ICE Officer. It's hard to believe that he's even alive!  But he's now recovering in the hospital. 

And who is to blame?  It’s the Radical Left!

All lies.  Every bit of it.

On Fox News, Jesse Watters highlighted that Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by ICE, had "pronouns in her bio".  Fox News as usual is stunted whenever a victim of these kind of incidents is a white person.  They lose much of their vocabulary. 

And as this terrifying moment in American history was unfolding in real time, what did Mr. Brooks choose to write about?   

Take a wild fucking guess.  

The problem is that the populists on left and right [in the work of fiction Brooks is referencing] are disgusted by the social order and values Rustin embodies, and they tear it down...

That order and those restraints are now being destroyed. People on both left and right decided that the old neoliberal order was a hypocritical pose elites had adopted to mask their own lust for domination...

Brooks then blats on for several paragraphs about “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.” 

The children of darkness have advantages in their struggle against the children of light. They know what they want and don’t have to worry about nuance. It’s easier to destroy a social order than to build one. They capitalize on an elemental human reality: Humans fear death and their own insignificance. They compensate for their fears of insignificance by asserting their pride, by seeking power and control, if only vicariously through some strongman.

And who exactly are the Children of Darkness?

The left progressives and the right populists who seek to tear down the neoliberal order are being shortsighted — idiotic, frankly.

Every example of malice, intolerance, ideological arson and open fascism Brooks cites -- every single one -- is drawn from the Right.  And yet because Brooks is so utterly hollow -- a bespectacled wraith so in love with his dead and discredited ideology that, for 22 years, he has used his New York Times column to prop up its corpse and wave its arms around --  all he can think to write about at this game-changing moment in American history is what a rough time Awesome Moderates are having because of the Extremes on Both Sides.   

Because, as I noted a few paragraphs back, that is literally all Brooks ever writes about.  

This is from me, back in 2010 ("How To Write a David Brooks Column"), telling any "Young Writer out there exactly how you too can learn to write a New York Times Opinion Page Editorial just like America's Last Reasonable Conservative, David Brooks!"

In just 10 Easy Steps you'll be punditting like a pro!

1) Pick a subject. Any subject. From Tasseled Loafers to Torture, it literally does not matter.

2) Quote extensively from one person or group on the subject. It's OK to just more-or-less copy and paste in big hunks of what whatever-you-happen-to-be-reading-at-the-moment to flesh out your 800-word column. Here at the Times we call that "research"!

3) Quote from some other person or group on the same subject who appears to hold a different opinion. If no actual opposition exists, just put on your Magic Green Jacket and invent an opposing opinion.

4) Although such is not the case with today's subject, as often as possible, try to impute these fictional distinctions to the different hemispheres of the political Universe. So no matter how bigoted, reckless or just bugfuck crazy the Right behaves, you just go right ahead and blandly assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the Left is equally and oppositely bad in exactly the same qualities and quantities. Here at the Times we call that "seriousness"!

5) Discover in your final paragraph or two that -- amazingly! -- the precise midpoint between those two completely artificial positions on an imaginary spectrum just happens to be exactly the Right and Reasonable answer!

Oh boy!

6) Rinse and repeat. No matter what the subject, no matter how false or bizarre the equivalence, just rinse and repeat. Twice a week.

7) Every week.

8) Year.

9) After year.

10) After year.

Long ago this stopped being a "style", and started being a fetish, Mr. Brooks

And now?  15 years later?  Living under a lawless, murderous, fascist regime spawned and midwifed into existence by David Brooks' Republican party and David Brooks' conservative movement?

He's still at it.

Every week.

Year.

After year.

After year.

I Am The Liberal Media

I Have Detailed Files: Another David Brooks Adventure.

"As much as we lament the horror of what's happened over the last year, it's much more horrible than I anticipated, for people like me, we have to ask ourselves, what do we do to bring this about?" says David Brooks. https://to.pbs.org/3L9sXu2

[image or embed]

— PBS News (@pbsnews.org) December 26, 2025 at 9:30 PM

40 years too late Brooks is suddenly interested in asking, "What did people like me do to bring this about?"  

And since the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, blogger like me have spilled millions of pixels answering this question in exhaustive detail.

Here's a short answer:

Which is why Liberal bloggers are still media pariahs, and we always will be, while Never Trumpers -- who are willing to spin comforting fairy tales and alibis for revered legacy media hacks like Brooks -- have quickly become successful and profitable legacy media darlings.  

I Am Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 956: 2025 In Review, Part 3 (of 3)

"All the pieces matter." --  Detective Lester Freamon, The Wire

• 
  

In Certain Corners of The New York Times...

...it's always 2005.

A sheltering bower, protected from the real world by the Sulzberger family's firm belief that the nation is crying out for the opinions of these two bootless relics.

Burn The Lifeboats

Just When I Thought I Was Out...

...They Pull Me Back In.

As much as I'd like to write more about this -- so much more! -- now that the Liberal critique of politics and the media has been written out of history, I guess my civic duty is to sit patiently and wait for The Bulwark to tell me what I should think of the most recent musings of Mr. David Brooks.

While we wait, perhaps you might enjoy this post from The Before Time in which I posit a future brawl among academic historians over whether or not such a creature as a "David Brooks" could ever have actually existed:  In Search of Historic Bobo.

Or this from even further back in the Before Time in which Mr. David Brooks attempts to file a police report:  The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the Congress with His Head Up His Ass While Sucking His Own Balls

Burn The Lifeboats

David Brooks Loves Murrica So Much More Than You Do

It would be a trivial matter to chalk up David Brooks' latest crime against journalism as yet another bottom-of-the-barrel scraping from one of the most "legacy" of the legacy media's professional opinion-havers who lost what little hold he had on the plot 40 years ago and has been drifting further and further from the gravitational field of actual reality ever since.

And perhaps this was the project all along.  Brooks as Sulzberger family sociological experiment like those conducted on the International Space Station on Antarctic moss or freeze-dried mouse sperm or E. coli.  to see what effect microgravity, extreme temperatures, the hard radiation of the vacuum of space might have on normally Earthbound biological life.  

In this case, the experiment began almost by accident, with the House of Sulzberger  buying Patriotism Insurance during the high cotton days of the Dubya administration by hiring not one but two of the Iraq War's biggest cheerleaders from the Weekly Standard stable of neocon vipers: David Brooks and Bill Kristol. Then, as the Dubya administration began to collapse, they decided to hang onto Brooks (and sack Kristol) because, A) sacking both of their peak-Iraq-War diversity hires at the same time would make them look even more craven than they already looked, and, B) as the legacy media mantra abruptly shifted from "Liberals are America-hating, terrorist-loving dupes" to "Both Sides Do It" Brooks was able to show the Sulzberger family his real value by his willingness to  transform himself almost overnight from the acid-penned scourge of the Murrica-hating Left to America's most zealous evangelist of Both Siderism.  

But then, having set this experiment in motion, the House of Sulzberger just sorta filed Brooks away and moved on to other things, leaving the David Brooks Project to overrun the Petri dish where it had originally been cultivated.

This environment of permissive neglect led Brooks to (pardon the metaphor shift) achieve an opinion-having escape velocity from the Real World's gravity-well of facts, history and consequences where the rest of us live.   Now Brooks exists almost entirely in a state of ontological free fall, responsive only to the microgravitational influence of the political, cultural and financial elites who are desperate to believe in the fairy tale world Brooks has invented for them.  A world where hippy-punching is still considered great sport, and the *real* Republican party -- the Party of Reagan -- is still out there somewhere waiting for this temporary MAGA aberration to subside.  

A world where the Times can't be bothered to proofread Brooks and edit for glaring typos:

Typos 3 through 5: a great man liked St. Augustine, the occasionally recklessness, and “great replacement: are bad David Brooks typos for a great man like St. Augustine, the occasional recklessness or occasionally the recklessness, and “great replacement.” cc @jfidelino_nyt pic.twitter.com/7H3CfF1r5y

— Typos of the New York Times (@nyttypos) November 28, 2025

However, even as he floats safely high above the treacherous shoals of history and razor-sharp mountains of facts, the rise of Trump as irrefutable proof that Brooks has been wrong about the Right all along, has made Brooks' Both Siderist scam exponentially tougher than it was back when I wrote this during the Before Time:

Longtime readers know of my crazy theory that Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times does not write editorial columns twice a week per se, but is instead engaged in a massive, long-range project to assemble an entire, fictional alternate history of Modern Conservationism, which is being created right before our eyes by the slow, steady accretion of one godawful Whig Fan Fiction column at a time.

I make mention of it every now and then --

To David Brooks' ongoing, long-range project of radically revising modern history by removing all the Republican treasony bits, you may now add this little gem of falsification which was partially buried under his woozy praise for Hillary Clinton's "muscular" ideas about foreign policy...

-- not because I am under any illusion that I can do anything to stop it --

These stories are not about the world as it actually exists, but the world as Mr. Brooks wishes it to be.  And since he is not a very good fiction writer, there are many, many points where the gears of the real world and his fake Whig World grind and howl, forcing Mr. Brooks to apply gallons of fictive lubricant to keep the keening noise of the real world ripping Whig World off its hinges from drowning out the tepid drone of his writing.

When Mr. Brooks needs an imaginary moral high ground of Centrism on which to stand, he conjures an imaginary army of Dirty Fucking Hippies on the Left that exactly counterpoises the very real mob of Pig People on the Right. 

When he wants to redress what he believes to be the immorality of the deficit, he wishes away the entire, debt-drunk Bush Era and instead pounds away at naughty people having sexy sex time in ways Mr. Brooks does not approve of and invents Whig FanFic "grand bargain" and "austerity" sub-genres wherein he expounds on his rustic theories about money and cutting social programs.  After which he regularly has his ass absolutely sawed off and served up on the fine china by people like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman and myriad others who actually know what they're talking about.

...

-- but simply because it is sickening to see such a brazen slow-motion theft and mutilation of history --

University of Chicago history baccalaureate David "Even David Brooks" Brooks has written a genuinely remarkable and revealing column about the rise and fall of American Conservatism.

What makes it remarkable and revealing it is not its scholarly depth or historical breadth or scathing, confessional honesty, but rather that it is a work of almost pure fiction being passed off as fact in America's Newspaper of Record...

Protected as he is by the permissive neglect of his employers and the desperation of the elites for whom he performs, the lies Brooks has to spin to protect his readers from the crushing reality snarling right outside their front door have become increasingly ludicrous and fragile in the Age of Trump.  The gossamer-thin fantasies  and still require constant maintenance.  Which explains Friday's column which began with this declaration:

Members of the two parties have different sorts of pride in their country.

Followed by this truly jaw-dropping bit about the Republican party during the Obama administration, which, well, the word "lie" hardly covers it.  It is the complete negation of the reality which every one of us saw with our own eyes, and heard with our own ears.  

Republican pride is unconditional. Democrats like Barack Obama and Joe Biden can get elected to the presidency, and it has almost no effect on the pride Republicans feel for America. 

From the day of his inauguration until the day he left office, the Republican party and Conservative media spent all of their energies openly rooting for Obama to fail and pulling every lever they could lay their hands on to disrupt and sabotage everything Obama the Centrist tried to do.  For example, from The Guardian, February 2, 2009:

When Barack Obama became president there were celebrations around the world. Car horns were honked in Mexico City, thousands gathered to watch the inauguration on big screens in Liverpool and Leeds, feasts were held in Kenya. Yet the festive spirit failed to permeate one small corner of Manhattan, home to the right-leaning cable channel Fox News. While the city's streets were filled with the sound of fireworks and champagne corks popping, the mood in its studios was almost sombre. This is the conversation that took place on air between the two Titans of conservative broadcasting, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity:

Hannity: "So do you want [Obama] to succeed?"

Limbaugh: "I'm so glad you asked me this question . . . No! I want him to fail."

A few days earlier, speaking on his own talk radio show, broadcast from his home in Palm Beach, Florida, Limbaugh had put his feelings even more pithily. Responding to a newspaper that asked him to express in 400 words his hope for the Obama presidency, he replied: "I don't need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails"...

On the Right, the Obama years were an eight-year racist primal scream followed by nominating and electing the King of the Birthers because Barack the Communist Kenyan Usurper has stolen their country.

But their country is not our country.  

Their country -- the one in which they have such pride -- surrendered to our country at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.   They have never gotten over it, and since the 1960s, they have been busy, busy, busy turning the Party of Lincoln in the Party of Jefferson Davis and in doing so, paving the way for the rise of a monster like Trump.  

From  Brother Charlie Pierce, September 25, 2012:

Our Mr. Brooks Picks His Own Private History

Up there on the left, that's Harry Dent, Sr. He was a conservative political strategist of the 1960's and 1970's. He worked for, among other people, the famous wandering and miscegenating penis, Strom Thurmond, and for Richard M. Nixon, who, back then, was not yet history's yard waste. While working for the latter, Dent devised what has become known as the "Southern strategy," by which he attached the Republican Party to the rising white counter-assault on the gains of the civil-rights movement, and to modern American conservatism, which already had done so, largely through the efforts of William F. Buckley and the National Review crowd. Dent begat Lee Atwater, who begat Karl Rove. In today's column in The New York Times, in which he traces the current paradox of modern American conservatism, David Brooks mysteriously overlooks all the hard work Harry Dent and his acolytes did in making sure that conservatism could count on the backing of the supporters of American apartheid.)...

Our country is the one that believes that resurrecting an overtly fascist version of the Confederacy decked out in 21st Century glad rags is a terrible idea.  Which leads us to Brooks' second, sweeping declaration:

Democratic pride is more conditional. It dropped a bit during George W. Bush’s first term, then began to gradually decline during the Great Awokening around 2014 and really collapsed during each of President Trump’s two terms. 

Textbook Brooksian fatuous argle-bargle coupled with some gratuitous hippy punching, and the Alert Reader will notice how Brooks skips over George W. Bush's catastrophic second term which bore out every critique the Left had about the Right all along, and exposed men like Brooks as the willfully blind, partisan hacks that they are.   

Then comes Brooks' reminder to his elite clientele about how much more patriotic he and they and Republicans are than us dirty hippies:

I don’t side much with the party of MAGA these days, but my patriotism is more like the Republican kind — unconditional. ...

At this point I'm guesstimating that Brooks has killed about half the bottle of top shelf scotch I assume he was nursing to give him the Dutch courage needed to grind his way through this codswallop.  

Then, killing the rest of the bottle, Brooks decided to go all-in, and lash Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump and Elon Musk with the binding of love of country

When you love America for its raw energy, you are loving it for a force that also produces crassness, materialism and, from time to time, immaturity. That is to say, the same cultural winds that propel the noble aspirations of an Abraham Lincoln, also propel the gaudy display of a Donald Trump and the occasionally recklessness of an Elon Musk.

Reducing the monstrous shadow Trump has thrown across American democracy to the word "gaudy", and reducing Musk's berserker, chain-saw gutting of the American government to "occasionally recklessness" is wild, but praising Lincoln's "noble aspirations" while criticizing Democratic pride as "conditional" absolutely takes the prize, and is symptomatic of a fetish shared by a number of Conservative opinion-havers: praising Lincoln as a Great Uniter with noble aspirations while carefully avoiding any mention of the actual Lincoln.  From me, five years ago:

What's appalling is that Very Serious Beltway Pundits like David Brooks have no love for the actual Lincoln. The guy who is buried two miles from my front door. Instead, they love their imaginary Lincoln just as they love their imaginary Reagan.

Their imaginary Lincoln is a Lincoln without Shiloh or Cold Harbor. A Lincoln without the Wilderness or Vicksburg or the Shenandoah Valley.

Their Lincoln is two-dimensional caricature of the actual Lincoln. A gentle redeemer and uniter, and not the man who went through just about every general in the Union Army until he found one that would do what needed to be done: crush the Confederacy completely, regardless of the cost. One that would bomb their cities, burn their crops, slaughter their armies and starve their citizens until, at last, their will to make a traitor's war against the United States was broken and they finally gave up.

There is no place in Mr. Brooks' gauzy cartoon version of American history for a Lincoln who recognized a mortal threat to the nation coming from a despicable confederacy of its own citizens, and who ruthlessly used every bloody means at his disposal to utterly destroy that threat. No place in his idylls for a Lincoln who offered reunion and reconstruct to the South only after they had been beaten to their knees and forced to accept surrender or face extinction.

And if this all sounds weirdly familiar, well it should. I penned something similar when Mr. Brooks reached for that ol' reliable jug of Imaginary Lincoln three years ago ("David Brooks: Controlling The Future By Butchering The Past"):

That's right.  To serve his political agenda, Mr. Brooks has very deliberately omitted the entire context for one of the greatest speeches in American history:  the fact that there were two sides to the Civil War -- one which was dedicate to destroying the nation in order to preserve the institution of slavery, and another -- led by Abraham Lincoln -- which was determined not to let that happen.

And as to Mr. Brooks' claim that "Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years."?   Well for fuck's sake, David, just read the very next god damn paragraph of the speech you are god damn quoting:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

In Mr. Brooks' Both Siderist version of America history, Lincoln is transformed into a disembodied specter who somehow just floats above all of this, hand-in-hand with Mr. David Brooks, as together they survey the sad and petty squabbles of the wretched Extremes on Both Sides, both in 1865 and 2017...

Among America's elite pundits you see this detaching of reality from the fairy tale they are selling everywhere.  This absurd proposition that "America" is somehow unrelated to the attitudes and actions of the actual Americans who make up the country.  That "MAGA" and "Republicans" are two different things. In this case we find Lincoln's "noble aspirations" completely divorced from the bloody and brutal war which was the price of realizing some of those noble aspirations: the wholesale destruction of American cities and putting hundreds of thousands of Americans into their graves.  

And the dilemma which faced Lincoln is a pretty fair glass-half-empty analog of where Democratic pride in our country stands right now:  the sobering realization that, to save the country we love, will require the recognition that millions of our fellow Americans have become enemies of democracy.  That their version of "love of country" is founded on rage, racism and paranoia, which has all been relentlessly fueled by Conservative media.  And that to save our democracy from our carefully cultivated, home-grown demons, severe measures may have to be taken to pry their poisonous claws away from Lady Liberty's throat.

Having come this far, it will not surprise you that Brooks winds his brief excursion through a modern American political history which never existed, by lighting votives and reciting a praiseful paean at the tomb of St. Reagan, pretending that MAGA is some kind of exotic parasitic disorder which has only recently infected his Republican party and will one day soon be shrugged off, and, of course, as little more gratuitous hippy-punching.

Some Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California seem to think they can win the White House by behaving more like Trump, by thinking more like Trump, by adopting that dark American carnage vibe. This strikes me as political lunacy.

This from the same guy who, in 2014, crowed that the Republican party had definitely cleaned up its act and was definitely on its way to a bright future and who, in 2016, confidently predicted that the Republican nominee for president was gonna be Rubio!

You, dear reader, could be forgiven for wondering -- loudly -- how the fuck this clown with a nearly perfect track record of being consistently wrong about the one subject the Sulzberger family pays him a king's ransom to know something about...how this buffoon keeps his job at the Times.  

And that would be an excellent question, if the Sulzberger family were paying Brooks for his savvy, insider political expertise.  But they're not.  The Sulzberger family pays David Brooks float far above our mundane world of fact and history and consequence and spin golden, gossamer lies to ease the fears and reinforce the parochial political follies and fantasies of the wealthy patrons who desperately want to buy what Brooks is selling.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Epstein, Schmepstein: David Brooks Would Like Everyone To Shut Up About The Epstein Files

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.

I would, however, point out that, 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 has bellyflopped onto the hard pavement of the Epstein scandal, his friend David Brooks now dismisses the whole thing as old news so let's just move along here people!

Never before have I been so uncertain about the future. Think of all the giant issues that confront us: artificial intelligence, potential financial bubbles, the decline of democracy, the rise of global authoritarianism, the collapse of reading scores and general literacy, China’s sudden scientific and technological dominance, Russian advances in Ukraine. … I could go on and on. So what has America’s political class decided to obsess about over the last several months?

Jeffrey Epstein.

This is a guy who has been dead for six years and who last was in touch with Donald Trump 21 years ago, Trump has said.

Although I might be forgiven if I notice that the fact that his friend is teetering up on the windy gibbet of professional, personal and legal catastrophe just happens to coincide with Brooks hand-having the entire Epstein File scandal away as just QAnon madness, which has "taken over America" and no one except David Brooks is 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. 

I also cannot ignore the fact that Brooks is clearly so desperate to shut this all down that he hauls out his oldest, most despicable and most toxic responsibility dispersion weapon -- his Both Sides Do It razor-in-the-apple -- and lobs 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.

If I thought for one minute that Brooks' idiotic opinion grew out of infantile naivete and cluelessness, I'd direct him to any of the many, many times we have explained the difference between the thousands of everyday, ludicrous, quotidian lies he spews to keep the media off balance and his meathead MAGA base on-side, and a load-bearing lie upon which the entire structure and all the other lies depend.

For example, "Both Sides Do It" is the load-bearing lie that props up David Brooks' career.  With it, and with an army of fellow media travelers to evangelize it, his position at the top of the legacy media shitpile is unassailable.  But without it, he is nothing, he has nothing, and it all falls apart because it eliminates the last refuge of the worst people.  Which is why, for 21 years on this blog, and for going on 16 years on our Professional Left podcast, I have said over and over again, if you take out the Both Sides Do It Center, the Right will fall.  

Similarly, the QAnon Epstein Files lie is perhaps the most critical of the load-bearing lies propping up the Trump administration.  Releasing the files and bringing a global pedophile network to book wasn't just another empty promise Trump made to stupid people to get their votes, and which those stupid people are willing to forget the next day.  

The load-bearing lie of QAnon is that Donald Trump – the Dear Leader – has been sent by God to clean up this wicked world.  Which is why most of them go right on believing him no matter what, and releasing the Epstein Files was a sacred vow.  These are the lies that the base is most deeply invested in defending.  

Brooks should understand this dynamic extremely well, because during the reign of George W. Bush, Brooks was in the business of selling just such load-bearing lies to the rubes.  Bush was sold to the base as a Man of Faith and Business, whose sound judgment could be trusted because he was surrounded by foreign and domestic policy experts.

Brooks also knows damn well what happens when load-bearing lies fail.   With Bush, those lies were destroyed by Iraq, Katrina, Terri Schiavo and the collapse of the global economy.  Yes, there were many, many other lies, but in the decades since, when a Democratic president is having some trouble, no one asks, “Is this Obama’s Harriet Miers?”  They all ask, “Is this Obama’s Katrina”.  Those four, major, public catastrophes blew every one of Bush’s load-bearing lies away.  

And today, savvy Democrats looking for a way to topple this mad tyrant and his violent, destructive fascist regime aren't mindlessly "hopping on this bandwagon".  They recognize the exposed jugular of a load-bearing lie trembling near the point of an Iraq-level collapse when they see one, and they are going straight at it.  

The rest of Brooks' 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 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.

I also cannot completely rid myself of the idea that, for several years, Brooks was a wealthy,  middle-aged divorcé, who was anxious to keep his divorce on the downlow, but who was also lonely, influential, depressed, and who had many very wealthy friends who might have thought that what he really needed was to get his ashes hauled (as the kids say) via a discreet, professional procurer to the rich and powerful that some of them, like Larry Summers, had on speed dial.  

Why Does David Brooks Still Have A Fucking Job?

More Thrilling Tales of Both Sides Do It: Somehow David Brooks Returned

The Faith and Humility Reporter for the Acela Daily Pantograph has returned with a startling proposition.  David Brooks -- who discovered Christianity five minutes ago and very evidently doesn't understand it at all -- claims he has the cure for Christian Nationalism.

Think I'm kidding?  Here's the headline:

How to Replace Christian Nationalism

Well, if nothing else, I'm sure Brooks will succeed in catching the attention of the Tiki torch, "Jews will not replace us", Nazis-in-Dockers mob.

As your humble scrivener wrote on this very blog not so long ago, whenever he publicly belly-flops into the empty swimming pool of his own boundless ignorance about how America lives and works and thinks and feels in the Land Beyond The Hudson, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times frequently retreats to the one safe place where he can pontificate in galactically-sweeping language and no one will dare gainsay him.

The pulpit.

In the pulpit, Mr. Brooks is free to sermonize on the State of The Human Soul to his heart's content on the Sulzberger family's dime.  Which is nice work if you can get it.

This time, Mr. Brooks affects an understanding of the chaotic parade of American humanity so deep and so wise that he can not only diagnose how to undo Christian Nationalism, but explain exactly how and why the MAGA morons came to power here in the Land of the Free.

Well, more or less.

Here is the exact quote:

Somehow MAGA has swept in and made us a frightened nation, stagnant, callous and backward.

"Somehow"?!

Jesus, Mary, and Erwin Schrödinger, it would take a better mind than mine to calculate exactly how much of the inconvenient past Brooks casually obliterated with that word.  Acres?  Oceans?  

How many decades of Conservative propaganda -- to which Brooks eagerly contributed -- and how many decades of legacy media complicity -- to which Brooks still eagerly contributes -- did he just negate?  

How many elections did Brooks just annul? 

How much of America's long history of racism did Brooks just wish away with one, little word?

If you've followed Brooks' long career of getting everything wrong, you would understand why he has to seal the long and well documented trajectory of the GOP that led to Trump and MAGA in an oil drum and sink it deep, deep into the River Lethe.  Because the inconvenient history of his Republican Party and his Conservative movement are incompatible with the toxic scam Brooks has been successfully running for 30 years.  

As I have mentioned once or twice, while it is clear that the House of Sulzberger is going to go right on letting Brooks get away with murder on the op-ed page of The New York Times until he chooses to retire, for his brutal and ongoing mutilation of the past, at the very least the University of Chicago should revoke his B.A. in History.

Remember, this is the very same, willfully blind hack who casually dismissed racism as a motive for the Right's rabid, hysterical opposition to Barack Obama.   Who decided that there was no racism in the Fake Tea Party movement based literally on ... jogging past a small Tea Party rally once.  Who assured everyone in 2014 that his Republican Party had fully and finally "detoxified" itself and was looking ahead to a bright future, and assured everyone in 2016 that his party would obviously never nominate someone like Trump: that it was definitely gonna be Rubio!

And then there was Brooks' brief nonconfessional-confession tour, launched during the 2016 campaign, when his job was clearly on the chopping block because he had fucked up so consistently and so very, very publicly on the pages of The New York Times.  Here is a particularly illuminating snippet from Brooks on the still-defunct Charlie Rose Show in 2016:

Rose:  So you think you were wrong?  That you had somehow been on the Acela too much and had not done what?

Brooks:  As I say, I'm out in the country ... every week I'm somewhere ... but somehow I didn't see it coming.  I'm...I'm...I'm...I was not alone in that. A lot of us didn't see it coming.

Rose:  Oh I don't know anybody that saw it coming.

Brooks (smirking):  Yeah, I'm sure now there are people claiming they did but...um...

And right there you could see the  Beltway Common Wisdom being set in concrete.  Since no one saw this coming, everyone failed equally so no one is guilty.  No one is to blame.  And as long as we all agree to pretend that all the lowliest Liberal bloggers -- who had been warning about these conditions within the GOP for decades -- simply do not exist ... and so as long as Brooks promised to do a little painless penance -- to sojourn into the heart of American darkness and compare notes on Edmund Burke with shit-shovelers in Nebraska and pawn brokers in Kansas -- everything would be cool.  

Everyone could safely return to their default setting and no one would lose their job just because events had shown they never had the slightest fucking idea what they were talking about.  

So, back here in the Year of Our Lord, let's all gather 'round to bask in Brooks' next bit of Beltway folk wisdom.

I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. 

The "alien culture implant[s]" Brooks is referring to here are MAGA and its Christian Nationalist core proving once again, that Brooks has no qualms about dismissing centuries of inconvenient history when that history conflicts with the fairy tales he is still selling to his readers.  In this case, the fairy tale is one of inevitable American spiritual progress that has only been momentarily sidetracked, but will resume once Real Murrica shrugs off these alien cultural implants. 

I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. Eventually Americans, restless as any people on earth, will want to replace threat with hope and resume our national pilgrimage. When that cultural and spiritual shift occurs, a lot will change in our religious and political life.

So, according to Brooks, how exactly are we Americans supposed to Replace Christian Nationalism?

Well, since this is David Brooks' own idea, first he must run the entire, sprawling, messy canvas of American religious, spiritual and political life through -- no kidding -- his big, dumb, Both Sides Do It meatgrinder.  To fit inside Brooks' fairy tale, all of us in our millions must be reduced to two and only two sides, each equally flawed and misguided.

You think I'm kidding? 

Once you put people into categorical boxes, you are inviting them to see history as a zero-sum conflict between this group and that one. And sure enough, today we live in a political, cultural and religious war between two impoverished armies.

On the one side are the Christian nationalists, who practice a debauched form of their faith. Christian nationalism is particular rather than universal. It is about protecting “us” against “them” — the native versus the immigrant. It is about power more than love. It is about threat more than hope. It is rigid and pharisaical rather than personal and merciful.

On the other side are the exhausted remains of secular humanism. That humanism started out trying to liberate people from dogma, but it has produced societies in which people feel alienated, naked and alone. It has failed to formulate a shared moral order that might help people find meaning and solidarity in their lives. It is so enfeebled that it is being replaced by the religion of the phone — by shallow, technological modes of living.

As near as I can tell, David Brooks is actually contending that, somehow, bad polling questions (?!) have shunted all of us into one of these "two impoverished armies." 

This is followed by a hilariously awkward pivot from Brooks' ludicrously reductive assessment of the entire population of the United States ... to an unverifiable, anecdotal laundry list of what Brooks believes other people really, truly believe way down deep where only he can see.  And it's all based on this sentence here:

In my experience most believers...

This really is a museum-quality sample of everything wrong about Brooks.

His entire career has been a series of sweeping observations and predictions about politics, faith and culture virtually all of which have turned out to be laughable wrong...and which Brooks validated with his own, personal experiences and insider information, which have also turned out to be hilariously and unerringly wrong.  

 In fact, Brooks has been so consistently wrong about everything in exactly the same way over and over again, that I've often thought that descriptors like "hack", "goof" or "Sulzberger family houseplant" are insufficient.  So I've been fiddling with alternations .  None of them are entirely satisfactory, so I welcome any suggestions.

The Lay-Scholastic Pretension:   An intense episode of Aquinas-level bravado, typically triggered by reading a paragraph in a secondary commentary which under looming print deadline and immediately assuming one has unlocked the entire metaphysical universe.

The Ecclesial Overreach Principle: The belief that one’s private interpretation implicitly carries ecumenical authority, despite having no synod, council, bishop, or even small committee concurring.

The Magisterium of Me:  A potent affliction where a single individual speaks as though they are a church council, despite their only conciliar experience being an encounter with overpriced airport whiskey.

Burn The Lifeboats