Category: David Brooks Fisking Day

LOL: ‘Readers Added Context’ to Tweet by David Brooks and It’s Brutally Awesome

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Used to be, every Tuesday was “David Brooks Fisking Day” around here, as I’d dismantle that dishonest fraud’s New York Times column, but I eventually got bored with it. Now the fool has committed one of the great self-owns in the history of social media: Claiming on Twitter that his burger at the airport cost $78. Internet sleuths quickly figured out what restaurant Brooks was in: 1911 Smokehouse Barbecue, where the burger costs $17, meaning that Brooks drank somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 worth of cocktails. Is this — a New York Times columnist running up a bar tab of $50 drinking call-brand scotch at an airport restaurant — really “why Americans think the economy is terrible”? Probably not.

Brooks got more readers for that stupid tweet than he gets for his weekly columns. If the economy was really terrible, he’d be unemployed.



 

David Brooks Fisking Day Returns?

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The basic problem with David Brooks is that he hasn’t been punched in the face as often as he deserves to be punched in the face.

Which is to say, repeatedly, on a daily basis.

On two occasions, I happened to be at conferences where David Brooks was a speaker, and in both instances, I walked out of the room, overcome by rage, struggling to resist an urge to rush the stage, grab hold of that swine and pummel him until the cops hauled me off to jail.

Really, what’s a simple assault charge in Washington, D.C.? The city is so overwhelmed with serious violent crime that I doubt I’d get more than probation and a fine for beating up David Brooks, besides which nobody actually likes him. If I went for a jury trial, pro se, I’m pretty sure I could convince twelve honest citizens that clobbering David Brooks should not be considered a crime. Hell, it’s a civic duty. Anyway . . .

This week, Brooks published — in The Atlantic, where else? — an article titled, “The Terrifying Future of the American Right.” What was so “terrifying” about the recent gathering of conservatives in Orlando about which Brooks wrote this lamentable article? Anyone can read his description of the event and try to find something “terrifying,” and good luck with that. What the people at the conference are guilty of, really, is not giving a damn what readers of The Atlantic think about them.

Misanthropic Humanitarian at AOSHQ has further thoughts on Brooks, but unfortunately, none of them involve punching Brooks in the face.

Repeatedly, as he deserves.




 

Lincoln Project Senior Adviser Blames Capitol Riot on … David Brooks?

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If you’ve never heard of Rachel Bitecofer before, she’s a Ph.D. political scientist who captured widespread attention from liberals for her analysis of the 2016 election and her accurate prediction of the 2018 midterm elections. This got her a gig as a “senior adviser” to the Never-Trump grift gang at the Lincoln Project, and let me say this: Not everything she says is wrong. Bitecofer’s theory of how Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election was that a lot of people didn’t bother to vote because they didn’t believe Donald Trump had any chance of winning. Also, black voter turnout was way down because, let’s face it, Hillary wasn’t Obama.

But I could have told you that, without benefit of a Ph.D. Whereas I am just a blogger, Bitecofer has leveraged her credentials to market herself as an all-knowing, all-purpose political expert, which led her to offer the remarkable claim that David Brooks of the New York Times is somehow responsible for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

It is difficult to find words for how wrong this is. What seems to have offended Doctor Bitecofer is that Brooks, casting about for “two sides” of a left-right divide, decided that “elite universities” could be a bogeyman on the left, equivalent to “white supremacy” on the right.

Probably some white supremacists would be offended by that comparison. I mean, whatever evil the Klan did, they never charged anyone $300,000 for a useless Gender Studies degree, but I digress . . .

According to Doctor Bitecofer, the “radicalization” of Republican voters (e.g., the Capitol rioters) is the fault of the “conservative intelligentsia” (e.g., David Brooks), because they promote “the constant dehumanization” of “the other” (e.g., academic elites like Rachel Bitecofer). Thereby, Brooks has “done more, personally, to put people in that Capitol insurrection than nearly anyone else.”

There is a word for this, and that word is crazy.

However crazy it is, you see how Doctor Bitecofer arrived at her conclusion. The problem with the Capitol rioters, from her perspective, is that they don’t listen to people like her. Anyone who rejects the belief system promoted by academia is at risk of “radicalization,” according to Doctor Bitecofer (who, by the way, insists on being referred to as such).

The Capitol rioters are representative of GOP voters in general, in the minds of the liberal elite. Rachel Bitecofer believes that if you don’t vote Democrat, you are a menace to society — a white supremacist, probably, and a potential terrorist threat. One notices, however, that despite the “constant dehumanization,” there are no right-wing death squads roving college campuses with the intent to terrorize liberal academia. I have yet to see a single news story about Gender Studies professors being curb-stomped by the Proud Boys. That is to say, if David Brooks is guilty of “constant dehumanization” with his remarks about “elite universities” as “engines for inequality,” nobody has acted directly on that incitement.

By the way, what the heck is David Brooks saying in this column?

What idea of America does Joe Biden call us to unite around? It’s the old one. As Walt Whitman understood, America was founded mostly by people fleeing the remnants of feudalism, the stratified caste societies of Europe.

(Can someone familiar with Walt Whitman’s work please tell me where this “fleeing the remnants of feudalism” idea is to be found there? Brooks does not actually quote Whitman in his column, but just tosses this out there as if every literate person will nod in recognition. While I consider myself quite literate, I never much cared for Whitman, a degenerate bohemian, and so I confess myself in the dark here. Meanwhile . . .)

Today we have homegrown feudalism. On the right, we have white supremacy, an effort to perpetuate America’s racial caste system, and Christian nationalism, an effort to define America in a way that erases the pluralism that actually exists.

(Notice how, among pundits published by the New York Times, the words “white” and “Christian” can never be used except as pejoratives. White people are bad, and Christianity is wrong — this is the subtext of the attack Brooks makes on the kind of Republican voters he despises.)

On the left, less viciously, we have elite universities that have become engines for the production of inequality. All that woke posturing is the professoriate’s attempt to mask the fact that they work at finishing schools where more students often come from the top 1% of earners than from the bottom 60%. Their graduates flock to insular neighborhoods in and around New York, D.C., San Francisco and a few other cities, have little contact with the rest of America and make everybody else feel scorned and invisible. . . .

You can read the rest of that, if you happen to be feeling the kind of guilty masochistic urge that would make you want to subject yourself to the entirety of a David Brooks column. I’ve seldom been able to read more than a few dozen words by Brooks without feeling the urge to kick him in his smug little face. On the couple of occasions when I’ve actually been in the same room with Brooks, I walked out, simply because this violent urge was so overwhelming I feared the consequences:

RIGHT-WING BLOGGER JAILED
ON ASSAULT CHARGES AFTER
ATTACK ON N.Y. TIMES PUNDIT

Thank God, I was able to restrain the urge, so you haven’t seen that headline, yet. But my point is this: Nobody hates David Brooks more than I do, and you might think I would be happy that Rachel Bitecofer is blaming him for the Capitol riot. But somehow, I’m not happy.

Every intelligent and patriotic American should delight in the feeling of schadenfreude whenever anything bad happens to David Brooks, but so clumsy and misguided is Rachel Bitecofer’s attack on Brooks that she has cheated us out of this pleasure. This disappointment tells you a lot about the caliber of people associated with the Lincoln Project grift.




 

The Despicable David Brooks

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Once upon a time, David Brooks Fisking Day was celebrated here every Tuesday. The New York Times‘ token “conservative” column was so predictably wrong about nearly everything — his political instincts are so bad — that I had to lash him around every week just to relieve my system of the excess bile generated by reading his pretentious bulls–t. At least twice, circa 2007-2008, I walked out of events where Brooks spoke; the experience of being in the same room with him was intolerable. Once, a fews years ago, I found myself in a discussion with Jonah Goldberg as to which New York Times columnist was worse, David Brooks or Thomas Friedman. Goldberg insisted Friedman was worse than Brooks, and I suppose it’s a matter of opinion, but in my opinion, Goldberg is wrong. Friedman may be demonic, but David Brooks is Satan.

“Brooks should never be argued with — he should be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how.”

Why do I hate David Brooks so much? Because I am a populist, a Jacksonian who believes that the American people deserve a government that serves their interests, and not the interests of a decadent elite. All elites eventually become decadent and corrupt. This is what history teaches, and our country is being ruined by the sort of people David Brooks rubs elbows with during his annual pilgrimages to Davos, deracinated cosmopolitans with no loyalty to anything, devoted to no principle except the increase of their own wealth, status and power. The comprehensive wrongness of David Brooks eventually became so glaringly apparent — about the time he expressed his admiration of Barack Obama’s pants creases — that everyone realized he is Satan. Once his diabolical wrongness was universally acknowledged, everybody with a blog got in on the Brooks-fisking game, and I lost interest in the sport. Nowadays, it takes a really spectacular exercise in Brooksian douchebaggery to get my attention, and he delivered such a specimen earlier this week:

Donald Trump now looks set to be the Republican presidential nominee. So for those of us appalled by this prospect — what are we supposed to do?
Well, not what the leaders of the Republican Party are doing. They’re going down meekly and hoping for a quiet convention. They seem blithely unaware that this is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter. . . .

OK, let me interrupt this to make an important announcement. I hadn’t been planning to do this, but I now officially endorse Donald Trump.

If David Brooks hates Donald Trump, then it is my duty as a patriotic American to love Donald Trump. And if David Brooks says the fall election will be a “slaughter” for Republicans, this means Trump will win. And now let’s return to the total wrongness of David Brooks:

The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year high — a sure sign of rampant social isolation. . . .

(No, the high suicide rate is caused by the existential despair of Americans who understand that Barack Obama has destroyed their country.)

A record number of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach. And for millennials, social trust is at historic lows.
Trump’s success grew out of that pain, but he is not the right response to it. The job for the rest of us is to figure out the right response. . . .

(Who is “the rest of us,” Mr. Brooks?  Clueless douchebags on Pinch Sulzberger’s payroll? The people you hang out with in Davos?)

I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own.

(Which is to say, clueless douchebags.)

It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable. But this column is going to try to do that over the next months and years. We all have some responsibility to do one activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country. . . .
Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged. . . .
We’ll probably need a new definition of masculinity, too. There are many groups in society who have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Men are the largest of those groups. The traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore. It leads to high dropout rates, high incarceration rates, low labor force participation rates. This is an economy that rewards emotional connection and verbal expressiveness. Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old reticent, stoical ideal.

You can read the rest, but I must warn you that reading David Brooks columns can lead to existential despair and suicide. Honestly, I’d rather read Third Wave feminist theory textbooks. At least feminists are honest about hating men, hating America, hating God and everything else.

What is so despicable about David Brooks is his condescending attitude, his insuperable conviction that he is better than the rest of us, more intelligent and sensitive — all that “emotional connection and verbal expression,” you see. And as he departs on his tour of the American hinterlands, ripping himself out of the “bourgeois strata” to leap across “the chasms of segmentation,” I hope David Brooks gets what he deserves, namely to be beaten to a bloody pulp by a tattooed redneck.

This would be a triumph of social justice, really and it’s not hard to imagine how it would happen, either. Probably at a Waffle House.

“Hey, buddy, you look kinda familiar,” says the truck driver, while he’s paying at the cash register. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“You’ve probably seen me on Meet the Press or PBS Newshour,” says Brooks, who has been sitting at the counter, studying the menu and wondering why there’s no espresso. “My name’s David Brooks.”

“Well, doggone it, I thought so,” laughs the trucker. “I was just thinking to myself, that fellow looks like he writes for New York Times.”

“Thanks,” says Brooks, taking this as a compliment.

“So I guess you’re out here covering the election?” asks the trucker.

“No, actually, I’ve decided to leap across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country, to mingle with the common folks in an effort to discover why men are imprisoned by a stoical ideal.”

“Oh, really?” says the trucker. And after listening patiently to Brooks prattle on about his ideas, the trucker will gesture toward the parking lot. “You ought to come take a look at my truck. It’s a fine one.”

After he accepts this invitation, David Brooks will probably be surprised to discover that his tour of the parking lot includes an old-fashioned stoical ass-whupping, and maybe the trucker will be prosecuted for assault, but really, who could pass up such an opportunity?

Oh, there’s a reason I always walked out a room whenever David Brooks walked in. Restraining my Jacksonian populist urges requires conscious effort sometimes, and it’s best not to risk an assault charge.

Look what he’s made me do here. I’ve endorsed Trump for pure spite. The worst thing David Brooks can imagine is Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination, but what would be worse for Brooks — what he cannot even imagine — is for Donald Trump to be elected president.

Let us rekindle our Jacksonian spirit, America. Let us ignore the advice of David Brooks and ask ourselves, “What would Old Hickory do?”

If we cannot punch David Brooks in the nose — and I apologize to my readers for having passed up the chance when I had it — then what can we do to fulfill our duty to our children and to our nation’s future? How can we avenge the numerous insults that David Brooks has heaped upon us? How can we escape the condemnation of future generations if, knowing that we had a moral obligation to do the exact opposite of whatever David Brooks said we should do, we did not do it? Our honor is at stake, you see.

David Brooks, a foul stain on the history of American journalism, has thrown down the gauntlet and challenged us to prove him wrong. He has predicted “general election slaughter” for Republicans as a consequence of Donald Trump winning the GOP primary campaign, and declared: “People will be judged by where they stood at this time.” Will people stand with David Brooks? Will people join this supercilious punk in his determination to see Hillary Clinton elected? God forbid!

However crazy it seems, we cannot say it is impossible for Donald Trump to be elected president, and if it is possible to elect Trump, then we are obliged to do all we can to make this happen, if only because a victory for Donald Trump would be a defeat for David Brooks.

Don’t blame me for this. Blame David Brooks. And, also, Satan.

But I repeat myself.





 


Lenient Drug Policy Yields Bad Result

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David Brooks confessed in a New York Times column that he was a high-school stoner, by way of arguing against the legalization of marijuana. One of his erstwhile dope buddies replied with a column recalling how they got away with it in Radnor, Illinois:

[H]ere all along I thought he quit because of that time we got pulled over by the Radnor cops in senior year right after we’d clambaked his Mom’s Vista Cruiser, and first thing the cop does after the smoke clears is look him right in his red, red eyes, and said, “I don’t suppose it would go over so good if I went over to 632 Haverford Road and told Mr and Mrs Brooks their boy was out here with his clique smoking pot.” I was so impressed with the way Dave pulled himself together then. He didn’t beg for mercy or fight with the cop. Somehow he knew exactly how to go all bar mitzvah boy, how to talk to authority, how to flatter and impress and toady, even stoned to the gills, like his inner Eddie Haskell was deeper down than the pot could get. And it worked. The cop let us go, told us we were lucky he knew Dave and that we were white kids from Radnor, and later on, at the pizza house taking care of our munchies, chattering and cackling over our good luck and trying to figure out how Dave and the cop knew each other, busting on him for being a narc, Dave was quiet and pale and barely touched his hoagie, and I think that was the last time he smoked pot, at least with us.

Brooks’s ex-buddy Gary Greenberg is pro-legalization, whereas I think his anecdote proves quite the opposite point: We need a drastic crackdown on teenage dopeheads because if we don’t put these freaks in prison, they might grow up to be David Brooks.

 


David Brooks: ‘You Know Who Has Some Sharp Pants Creases? Mitt Romney!’

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The NYT’s token Republican columnist loves him some Mittens:

Over the past several months, Mitt Romney has been an excellent presidential candidate. He has performed superbly in the debates. He has outorganized his rivals. He has relentlessly stayed on his core theme of putting Americans back to work. He has taken Rick Perry apart with a cold ruthlessness that is a wonder to behold.

The emphasized sentence — even more than any other sentence in any David Brooks column — is clearly wrong. It was Michelle Bachmann (on the Gardasil issue during the Sept. 12 Tampa debate) and Rick Santorum (on immigration in the Sept. 22 Orlando debate) who did the most in terms of “cold ruthlessness” against Perry.

It is nevertheless true that, especially on immigration, Perry made the fatal mistake of letting Romney out-flank him on the right. As I said, “Dude. When your ‘conservative’ candidate makes Mitt Romney look like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, it’s over.”

If you are strong-minded enough to resist the temptation to believe well-written persuasive wrongheadedness, you have my permission to read the rest of Brooks’s column, But don’t dare come back into the comments telling me what brilliant arguments he’s made. That’s what makes Brooks so evil: He makes brilliant arguments for wrongness and, unless you have a strong mind, he might even persuade you that he isn’t evil.

He Made It to the Third Sentence

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David Brooks wrote two sentences before he lost me:

Over the past months, Republicans enjoyed enormous advantages. Opinion polls showed that voters are eager to reduce the federal debt, and they want to do it mostly but not entirely through spending cuts.
There was a Democratic president eager to move to the center.

Right. Obama — the guy whose pants creases David Brooks so admires — was “eager to move to center.”

Brooks then goes on to take cheap shots at Grover Norquist, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, among others, and also includes this:

The talk-radio jocks are not in the business of promoting conservative governance. They are in the business of building an audience by stroking the pleasure centers of their listeners.

Whose “pleasure centers” is David Brooks stroking, huh?

‘Coulter, She’s Just a Show Person’

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So says notorious scoundrel David Brooks (skip to 4:23):

The last time I saw Brooks at an event where he had been invited to speak, I quietly walked out of the room, hoping no one noticed the pulsing veins in my neck and forehead as I struggled to resist a sudden urge to charge the rostrum and strangle that vicious swine with my bare hands. The sight of him inspires overwhelming disgust and revulsion, but the sound of his voice . . .

God help me, it was nearly impossible to transcribe a six-word quote from that video, my hands were trembling with such intense rage.