Two Facts

[Content Note: Discussion of harassment and threats.]

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. David Brooks's latest garbage column is as insulting to his readers as it is embarrassing for him, confirming as it does how wildly out of touch he is with human beings who are not undilutedly privileged straight white cis men.

Entitled "How to Engage with a Fanatic," Brooks gives us this hot advice:

[T]he more I think about it, the more I agree with the argument Yale Law professor Stephen L. Carter made in his 1998 book "Civility." The only way to confront fanaticism is with love, he said. Ask the fanatics genuine questions. Paraphrase what they say so they know they've been heard. Show some ultimate care for their destiny and soul even if you detest the words that come out of their mouths.

You engage fanaticism with love, first, for your own sake. If you succumb to the natural temptation to greet this anger with your own anger, you'll just spend your days consumed by bitterness and revenge. You'll be a worse person in all ways.

If, on the other hand, you fight your natural fight instinct, your natural tendency to use the rhetoric of silencing, and instead regard this person as one who is, in his twisted way, bringing you gifts, then you'll defeat a dark passion and replace it with a better passion. You'll teach the world something about you by the way you listen. You may even learn something; a person doesn't have to be right to teach you some of the ways you are wrong.

Second, you greet a fanatic with compassionate listening as a way to offer an unearned gift to the fanatic himself. These days, most fanatics are not Nietzschean supermen. They are lonely and sad, their fanaticism emerging from wounded pride, a feeling of not being seen.

If you make these people feel heard, maybe in some small way you'll address the emotional bile that is at the root of their political posture.

Spoken like a man who doesn't routinely receive missives in his inbox from "fanatics" telling him that he should raped and murdered, and who hasn't even begun to reckon with the fact that our biggest problems isn't "fanatics," but resurgent Nazis.

The "fanatics" I deal with email me photos of bullets onto which they've photoshopped my name and publicly post offers of a reward for proof of my rape and/or murder and say things like "Too bad that terrible rapist didnt kill your fat ass. Cunt."

David Brooks thinks it would make me a better person if I responded to those people with "love." That I should respond with compassion and a willingness to learn how I'm wrong, presumably about how I have the right to exist in this life without being repeatedly subjected to threats of harm and actual physical violence.

Hard pass.

To extend "love" to fanatics is a luxury only of those who aren't in imminent danger at the hands of those fanatics. And conceding they have a point just to make them "feel heard," for the benefit of your own self-image, puts the rest of us at risk.

Surely David Brooks can find a better way to fluff his own ego than at the cost of our safety.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. David Brooks is a terrible journalist.

You might imagine that second fact is actually just my opinion, but I assure you it is not. Brooks confesses that he is a terrible journalist right in the opening paragraphs of his latest garbage column, which is all about how the Russia investigation is overblown, and has been filed under the headline "Let's Not Get Carried Away." It begins thus:

I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the Whitewater scandal. We ran a series of investigative pieces "raising serious questions" (as we say in the scandal business) about the nefarious things the Clintons were thought to have done back in Arkansas.

Now I confess I couldn't follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport.

Because Brooks is a terrible journalist, it isn't clear what the actual nature is of the pieces that confused him. Were they "investigative pieces" or were they "essays"? I'm not professor of garbage columns, but I'm pretty sure that "investigative essays" aren't a thing.

One might argue that Brooks' inability to follow the allegations made in his paper's "investigative essays" rendered him unfit to oversee its op-ed section, which was the playing field on which the national sport of speculation was played at the professional level.

One might further argue that Brooks' inability to understand details of presidential investigations renders him unfit to continue writing a column for the paper of record. Because, terrible journalist that he is and admits being, he does not make clear that the investigation of Team Trump's possible collusion with Russia is an outgrowth of an investigation into Russia's interference in our election, which is not in doubt. Ostensibly, the investigations are meant to tease out the various ways in which that interference was accomplished.

The investigation may or may not find evidence of collusion among the president's campaign staff and/or administration. But that's just part of a much bigger whole. And only a very, very terrible journalist would advise against "getting carried away" when there is so much at stake.

But maybe he just can't follow all the allegations being made. Perhaps the Times should hire someone who can.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. [Content Note: 'Splaining; privilege] This week, David Brooks retroactively trolls the Women's March, saying it "can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump," because: "In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues. ...All the big things that were once taken for granted are now under assault: globalization, capitalism, adherence to the Constitution, the American-led global order. If you're not engaging these issues first, you're not going to be in the main arena of national life."

LOLOLOLOLOLOL fuck you.

Every single thing about this column is indefensible trash, but perhaps my favorite (ahem) part is in this juxtaposition:

Finally, identity politics is too small for this moment. On Friday, Trump offered a version of unabashed populist nationalism.

It's so cute that David Brooks imagines that Trump's brand of "unabashed populist nationalism" (i.e. white supremacy) somehow isn't "identity politics."

Because it is. In fact, it is the original identity politics.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. This week, David Brooks is mystified by why Hillary Clinton is disliked. He's mystified by so many things! But he's got lots of solid theories. His theory on why Clinton is so disliked is that we don't know what she does for fun.

I guess it was time for another round of: Hillary Clinton is a huge failure for not letting us access every aspect of her personal life, despite the fact that she is shredded every time she gives us access to her personal life. Everyone's favorite game!

But obviously the best part of the entire piece is this:

[S]he was popular not long ago. As secretary of state she had a 66 percent approval rating. Even as recently as March 2015 her approval rating was at 50 and her disapproval rating was at 39.

It's only since she launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to impress the American people that she has made herself so strongly disliked.

She's made herself disliked! What a silly lady! She definitely shouldn't have done that to herself, don't you agree?

*thatface*

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Two Facts

[Content Note: White male privilege; racism.]

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column. I am not going to link to that column, because fuck that, but here is a piece by Scott Eric Kaufman for Salon about that column, and there's a link from there, if you want to read the source.

2. David Brooks is the worst, has always been the worst, will always be the worst. A hostile bigotry machine, cloaked in an aw-shucks demeanor.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. This week, David Brooks is mystified by why, in the wake of the Republicans' midterm win, President Obama is not rolling over and making it easier for them to steamroll him with their terrible nightmare policies.

They say failure can be a good teacher, but, so far, the Obama administration is opting out of the course. The post-midterm period has been one of the most bizarre of the Obama presidency. President Obama has racked up some impressive foreign-policy accomplishments, but, domestically and politically, things are off the rails.

...Usually presidents at the end of their terms get less partisan, not more.

OFF THE RAILS!

I'm no highly paid pundit for the New York Times, but maybe the lesson that President Obama learned from the midterms is that capitulating to a Republican agenda, even slightly, even for the grand golden objective of bipartisanship, is not a winning strategy for Democrats. Just a thought!

Brooks, who loves to Concern Troll on behalf of the Democrats, wrings his hands about the President's plan to enact immigration reform via executive action.

I sympathize with what Obama is trying to do substantively, but the process of how it's being done is ruinous.

Republicans would rightly take it as a calculated insult and yet more political ineptitude. Everybody would go into warfare mode. We'll get two more years of dysfunction that will further arouse public disgust and antigovernment fervor (making a Republican presidency more likely).

Hahahaha thank you for your concern that governing like a Democrat might make a Republican presidency more likely, David Brooks! You're so thoughtful!

As for me, I fully support President Obama insulting the Republicans as often and as thoroughly as possible for the next two years.

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Two Facts

[Content Note: Privilege; bootstraps.]

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. This week's garbage column is like a trophy to garbage.

Under the headline "The Employer's Creed," David Brooks metes out advice to employers about who they should and shouldn't be hiring. Now, generally speaking, I agree with the advice that the perfect résumé does not axiomatically translate into the perfect employee, and I enthusiastically advocate abandoning the idea that someone with a less traditional résumé should be reflexively rejected. Sometimes people with the most interesting lives and experiences have the least impressive résumés.

But. BUT. Bear in mind that David Brooks has long been a proponent of BOOTSTRAPS! and a denier of the advantages of privilege when you read this shit:

Bias hiring decisions against perfectionists. If you work in a white-collar sector that attracts highly educated job applicants, you've probably been flooded with résumés from people who are not so much human beings as perfect avatars of success. They got 3.8 grade-point averages in high school and college. They served in the cliché leadership positions on campus. They got all the perfect consultant/investment bank internships. During off-hours they distributed bed nets in Zambia and dug wells in Peru.

When you read these résumés, you have two thoughts. First, this applicant is awesome. Second, there's something completely flavorless here. This person has followed the cookie-cutter formula for what it means to be successful and you actually have no clue what the person is really like except for a high talent for social conformity. Either they have no desire to chart out an original life course or lack the courage to do so. Shy away from such people.

So, basically, now anyone who precisely follows the model that "lifting yourself up by the bootstraps" has always required (within the confines of Corporate America) is either unoriginal or cowardly. Perfect.

That's maybe the kind of thing that makes some sort of sense to say in the brainpan of someone who pictures "middle class, able-bodied, thin, white, cishet male" as the default human job applicant, but it starts making a lot less sense when you take into consideration that pool of applicants may include, as but a few examples:

• People who are not able-bodied, thin, white, cisgender, straight, and/or male, for whom approaching a vanilla "perfection" has been their only means of being competitive.

• People who are first-generation travelers through the middle-class process, for whom the "cookie-cutter" model may be the only model to which they have access, simply by virtue of its ubiquity, as opposed to people whose parents and other relatives have provided multiple models of navigating middle-class access to them.

• People with names that indicate a background, ethnicity, religious affiliation, etc., prejudiced responses to which have "othered" them throughout their lives, who have learned that conformity in other ways is required to balance their very names.

• People who have overcome learning disabilities, social anxiety, illness, neglect, oppression, and/or other limitations to achieve what they've long been told (by people like David Brooks) is the right résumé of accomplishments to achieve success, whose arrival at this "boring" result is, in fact, indicative of a bravery paper cannot convey.

That's not a comprehensive list.

I'm sure David Brooks would balk at the suggestion that he seems to be moving the goalposts, now that people from marginalized classes are scoring goals in larger numbers. But if he doesn't like that accusation, then perhaps he should stop writing garbage that invites it.

[H/T to Shaker Mod aforalpha.]

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Two Facts

1. Republicans think people aren't entitled to food.

2. Republicans do not understand what it means to be human. David O. Atkins:

Republicans are very upset that people who are working just to hold onto health insurance might be willing to quit the labor force because the Affordable Care Act will allow them to. The notion that someone might devote their time to writing poetry instead of droning away at some awful job just to cover an insurance CEO's yacht fee positively incenses them...

It is not inaccurate or extreme to declare that ideological Republicans do not understand what it means to be human. ...It's not so much that conservatives don't believe such a world of boundless human potential is possible. It's that they don't want it to be possible.

Go read the whole thing.

And then when you're done, check out Mannion: "Hard at work or hardly working?"

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Two Facts

[Content Note: Misogyny; patriarchy.]

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. This week's garbage column is like a trophy to garbage.

You really have to read the whole thing, including his extended opening waxing romantic about the John Wayne movie The Searchers, to fully comprehend the scope of the garbagosity of his latest masterwank on the plight of male unemployment, because I'm only going to quote two bits:

The definitive explanation for this catastrophe has yet to be written. Some of the problem clearly has to do with changes in family structure. Work by David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that men raised in fatherless homes, without as many immediate masculine role models, do worse in the labor force. Some of the problem probably has to do with a mismatch between boy culture and school culture, especially in the early years.

But, surely, there has been some ineffable shift in the definition of dignity. Many men were raised with a certain image of male dignity, which emphasized autonomy, reticence, ruggedness, invulnerability and the competitive virtues. Now, thanks to a communications economy, they find themselves in a world that values expressiveness, interpersonal ease, vulnerability and the cooperative virtues.

Ha ha that sounds familiar! Except I'm not so daft invested in the Patriarchy as to misidentify as "dignity" that which is actually a rigid definition of binary gender performance that steals every human, irrespective of hir gender, of hir complex and complete humanity. That is: The complete opposite of dignity.

Surely, part of the situation is that many men simply do not want to put themselves in positions they find humiliating.

This is a particularly interesting observation, given that Brooks' "communications economy" is really a service economy. And women are entrained to serve, while men (at least privileged men, which are the only ones about whom Brooks gives a shit) are entrained to be served, so naturally taking a service job after the Patriarchy has assured you your whole life that you are entitled to service, to be expected to provide it instead, is humiliating.

Women, on the other hand, who have long filled service roles, while patriarchal forces conspired to keep women out of manufacturing, construction, and other traditionally "male" jobs, are not meant to find that work humiliating, but instead the natural outgrowth of a biological imperative.

As Erik Loomis notes here, the terrible irony is that the offshoring of traditionally "male" jobs is thanks to the politics of conservatives like Brooks: "The reason why male employment hasn't recovered is because the jobs men used to have no longer exist. That the 20th century economy was inherently sexist cannot be questioned. Men had industrial jobs that became high paying after decades of union organization. The middle-class of salesmen, middle managers, etc., was also dominated by men. Women were in service positions. Now you tell me, which jobs still exist in the United States in 2013? ...What remains is a service economy, with jobs long defined as female. Housekeeping, nursing, child care, entry level office work, Wal-Mart—these are jobs that are available."

Whoops.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. In this week's offering, which is about what's wrong with the GOP, Brooks manages to write this:

Since Barry Goldwater, the central Republican narrative has been what you might call the Encroachment Story: the core problem of American life is that voracious government has been steadily encroaching upon individuals and local communities. The core American conflict, in this view, is between Big Government and Personal Freedom.

While losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, the flaws of this mentality have become apparent.

—and then fails to address even obliquely that the "apparent flaw" is actually the profound hypocrisy of the Republican Party, who continue to narratively position themselves as the defenders of Small Government and Personal Freedom while recklessly spending enormous amounts of taxpayer money on bullshit and trying to use the power of government to compel forcible childbirth, deny basic equality, and crush workers' right to organize.

The GOP isn't even honest about who they are when they're navel-gazing. Americans expect politicians to lie to us, but we expect them at least not to lie to themselves.

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Two Facts

[Content Note: Violence; terrorism; racism; misogyny.]

As you may recall, in August of this year there was a shooting at the Family Research Council's D.C. offices, in which a security guard was injured but survived. Last week, as briefly noted here, the suspect in the shooting, Floyd Lee Corkins II, who was taken into custody at the scene has been indicted on a terrorism charge.

Here are two interesting facts:

1. The Family Research Council is a conservative, anti-gay organization which has been identified as a hate group by the SPLC.

2. Floyd Corkins is a person of color. I don't know how he personally identifies, but he was described in early reports on the day of the shooting as a "black male."

Here is a variation on those facts:

1. The Family Research Council is not an abortion clinic.

2. Floyd Corkins is not a white man.

Discuss.

[Note: In case it isn't evident, I am not making an argument for less scrutiny in this case. I am making an argument for more scrutiny when the targets of terroristic acts are pro-choice women and they are committed by white men.]

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. That column gets more ridiculous by the week.

As always, there is much to love laugh at in Brooks' latest, in which he imagines what Mitt Romney's opening statement of tomorrow night's debate should be, but I think this is probably my favorite part:

I've tried to be on the level with you. This president was audacious in 2008, but, as you can see from his negligible agenda, he's now exhausted. I'm not an inspiring conviction politician, but I'll try anything to help us succeed. You make the choice.

LOL OKAY! Decisions decisions. I choose the inspiring guy with conviction, rather than the guy who reeks of desperation and will "try anything."

Great argument for your cool candidate, Mr. Brooks! Solid as always.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still inexplicably being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column that is full of obfuscations, simplifications, and lies.

2. David Brooks uses this week's garbage column to write a modern history of conservatism, which completely elides the shit-nightmare that is radical extremist social conservatism.

This is what that column would look like, if David Brooks were half as smart and honest as he imagines himself to be.

[As always, drifty is all over Brooks' bullshit, too.]

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still inexplicably being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column that sounds like it's written for imaginary people in a town called Dodoville.

2. David Brooks actually starts his New York Times column this week with the line: "Why did God put Barack Obama on this earth?"

Shut up. Shutupshutupshutup. Shut up.

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Two Facts

[Content Note: Homophobia; Christian Supremacy.]

1. Kirk Cameron is not just a former teen star of a shitty sitcom; he is also a banana aficionado, awesome board-game inventor, internet pioneer, evolution debunker, and maker of great movies.

2. He is also suuuuuuuuuuuuuper homophobic!

Kirk Cameron fears homosexuality will destroy the world.

The one-time sitcom star who went from atheism to conservative Christian during the 1980s slammed gay marriage as "destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization" and called homosexuals "detrimental" to society during an interview Friday.

"I think that it's unnatural," Cameron told Piers Morgan on CNN.

In terms of gay marriage, the "Fireproof" actor said, "I believe marriage was defined by God a long time ago... One man, one woman for life till death do you part. So I would never attempt to try to redefine marriage."

Cameron then added, "So do I support the idea of gay marriage? No, I don't."

When he's done collecting ALL THE OSCARS for looking confused, he should definitely report to Oslo for the Nobel Yeesh Prize.

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Two Facts

1. This Suzanna Andrews Vanity Fair profile of Elizabeth Warren is very informative, both about Warren and her journey to consumer advocate and about the systemic problems that underlie her advocacy and the Occupy Wall Street movement. I especially liked this part:

Warren was not always a critic. Born and raised in Oklahoma, Elizabeth Herring spent most of her early life performing all the good-girl Stations of the Cross. She won the Betty Crocker competitions, married for the first time at 19, had two children before she was 30, and was once a registered Republican...

It was in 1979 that Warren had her Damascene conversion—the experience that would lead her to become the nation's top authority on the economic pressures facing the American middle class, and trigger her passionate advocacy. In 1978, Congress had passed a law that made it easier for companies and individuals to declare bankruptcy. Warren decided to investigate the reasons why Americans were ending up in bankruptcy court. "I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters," she said in a 2007 interview. "I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us." What she found, after conducting with two colleagues one of the most rigorous bankruptcy studies ever, shook her deeply. The vast majority of those in bankruptcy courts, she discovered, were from hardworking middle-class families, people who lost jobs or had "family breakups" or illnesses that wiped out their savings. "It changed my vision," she said.

From then on, Warren would focus her research on the economic forces bearing down on the American middle class.

2. This David Brooks New York Times garbage column is even more hilariously awful when read back-to-back with the above-linked piece. I especially "liked" this part:

If there is a core theme to the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is that the virtuous 99 percent of society is being cheated by the richest and greediest 1 percent.

This is a theme that allows the people in the 99 percent to think very highly of themselves. All their problems are caused by the nefarious elite.

It's funny how much different things look from the ground, and from the top of an ivory tower, where one's imaginings about what it feels like to get one's hands dirty in the grassroots is no substitute for the actual feel of dirt under one's nails.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being paid to write a garbage column for the New York Times.

2. David Brooks says he's a sap, but, really, he's a jejune, wearisome, sanctimonious concern troll of such profound tedium that to actually be a sap would be a dynamic improvement of exponential proportions.

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Two Facts

[Trigger warning for sexual violence and war.]

1. One in 3 female members of the military are sexually assaulted during their service, making them more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.

2. Via Christie Thompson: "A startling study released yesterday found that 80 to 90 percent of New Mexican women veterans with PTSD say the cause was sexual assault, not warfare."

In good news, due to a rule change by the Department of Veteran Affairs made last summer, it is now easier for servicemembers diagnosed with PTSD to get disability benefits.

Of course, that depends on getting an accurate diagnosis in the first place, which itself can be quite a challenge, to put it politely.

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Two Facts

1. In case you haven't heard, the Republicans are trying to hold the economy hostage again, in order to get what they want, which is to further ruin the ailing economy with their resoundingly discredited fiscal policies. Steve Benen is spot-on here: "The hostage strategy itself—Republicans will crash the economy on purpose unless Democrats give them what they want—is so offensive, it deserves to be a genuine national scandal. Indeed, it's often hard to believe policymakers who claim to be patriots are deliberately putting us all at risk this way."

2. The Republicans have run so wildly off the rails that even David Brooks is concerned. Noting the Democrats have capitulated on nearly everything the Republican Party wants, he writes:

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases.

...But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That's because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

He goes on to observe that, among their other failings, the "members of this movement have no sense of moral decency." Of course they don't, but David Brooks didn't notice or care until their void of ethics stands to affect his pocketbook. Which is why he's still the worst, even though he's right that the Republican Party stinks.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks has written yet another garbage column for the New York Times, called "Where Wisdom Lives."

2. Where Wisdom Lives is not in David Brooks' brainpan.

As usual, there are a lot of things wrong with Brooks' column, but this in particular struck me:

Some Democrats simply want to do nothing as Medicare careens toward bankruptcy. Last Sunday on "Face the Nation," for example, Nancy Pelosi said, "I could never support any arrangement that reduced benefits for Medicare."

Fortunately, more responsible Democrats are looking for ways to save the system.

Why do Brooks' editors allow him to get away with this mendacious horseshit? A failure to support reduced Medicare benefits is not axiomatically synonymous with "wanting to do nothing." There are various ways of addressing the potential shortcomings of Medicare that don't involve a reduction in benefits—raising taxes and/or creating a socialized healthcare system, for example, both of which Representative Pelosi has been known, ahem, to support.

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