David Brooks' Toxic Centrism Remains Undefeated

You can take the boy out of [checks notes] The Wall Street Journal, The Neocon Weekly Standard, The New York Fucking Times, Meet The Press, PBS and NPR...

...but you can't take The Wall Street Journal, The Neocon Weekly Standard, The New York Fucking Times, Meet The Press, PBS and NPR out of the boy.  

From The PBS NewsHour yesterday:

David Brooks:  Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.

That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore...

Jonathan Capehart:  I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left.

Let's hold on that a moment, because yesterday on the BlueSky Ana Marie Cox asked:

What are David Brooks' worst columns? Everyone can cite the sandwich one, and the Epstein one but of the top of dome--what else? He did say that wearing a Mets hat could save democracy once? (I'm making a video.)

My Bat Signal lit up and I replied as follows:

I'd ask "alphabetically or chronologically", but it's a trick question, since David Brooks has only ever written one column -- the same column -- over and over again.  But if I had to choose...it's "Collapse of the Dream Palaces" April, 2003, excerpted here.

A close second is the full-blown freakout when his very good friend & fellow Iraq war pimp, Joe Lieberman. lost to Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary in 2006.  And then lied about it later.

Now back to his PBS performance.

It is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".

It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.

All of which says a whole lot more about the people who keep paying him to confidently spout his poisonous claptrap decade after decade than it does about David Fucking Brooks himself.

I Am The Liberal Media

David Brooks' Ideologically Self-Negating Hot Take TurDuckEn

Warning:  You are about to be taken on a Cook's tour of an exotic meal which is not for the faint hearted, for it is made of such rarified ingredients that Mr. Brooks' probably imaginary high school graduate friend who was scared nearly into catatonia by Italian meats could not survive it.  

It is served in four courses over a seven month period, and contains opinions and anti-opinions in such precise balance that they annihilate each other leaving the diner with nothing at all.  

First course (from The New York Times, April 17, 2025):  Amuse-Bouche  --"The Righteous Authenticity of the Times Op-Ed Page”

A delicately puree of  alarm and disappointment.   Presented upon a chiffon of condescending.

The headline:  "What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal".

Summary:  What the hell is wrong with Americans? This is a five-alarm democracy fire!  Use whatever tools come to hand!  Break glass and all that, with notes of papal bull imperiousness.

The money quote:  "What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.:

Second course (from the PBS News Hour, October 3, 2025): Entrée -- "The Unquestionable Superiority of Preserving Meaningless Ritual In a Time of Crisis”

A bold reversal of principle, char-broiled in hypocrisy and marinated overripe ancient Beltway wisdom, served with a generous side of "Blame the Democrats".

The money quotes:

Geoff Bennett:  David, shouldn't the party that controls the House, the Senate and the White House do more to end a shutdown than just dig in?

David Brooks:  No. I hate the fact that we're here. So here's what happened.

In 2020, the Democrats win an election and they have power. And so, in 2021, they passed a bill which further increased the health insurance subsidies as part of Obamacare. And when they did it, they passed it to sunset in 2025. In 2024, the Republicans win an election. And guess what? They passed legislation that go with their policy priorities and they let the subsidies sunset.

And so what do you do if you're in a democracy? You go to the voters if you're a Democrat and you say, their policy is terrible. What Senator Warnock just said, their policy is terrible. Next time, why don't you vote for us? That's how a democracy functions.

But apparently we don't live in a functioning democracy anymore. Now, if we don't like the policy that the majority party passes, we shut down the government. And I'm not blaming Democrats solely. But I just think this pattern is so terrible for our democracy, is so terrible, what we just heard from the traffic controllers, and every organization...

And that's what our politics is descending into. And it's very bad for democracy. 

Pure Beltway, milk-fed arrogance. Served rare, naturally, upon a reduction of hectoring contradiction, accompanied by confit cognitive dissonance.

Third course (from The Atlantic, October 14, 2025): Plat Principal -- "Chef’s Genius Is Once Again in Evidence as He Fishes the Remains of His Very Popular Amuse-Bouche Column Out of  the Dumpster and Re-Heats It Nearly Verbatim.”

Encrusted with greater alarm, drizzled with ethically sourced scolding urgency, whipped into a mousse of smug self-reference.

The headline: "America Needs a Mass Movement -- Now. Without one, America may sink into autocracy for decades."

Summary:  People, we're at DefCon 2!   Time for every mother's son and daughter to get off their asses and into the streets!  For the love of God and George Washington, whoever you are and whatever you do for a living, find whatever sand you can and pour it into the gears of this monstrous regime!  To quote Churchill, "Action this day!"

The money quotes:

If you think Trumpism will simply end in three years, you are naive. Left unopposed, global populism of the sort Trumpism represents could dominate for a generation. This could be the rest of our lives, and our children’s, too.

So why are we doing so little? Are we just going to stand in passive witness to the degradation of our democracy?

By this past spring, Trump’s actions had become so egregious that I concluded that the time for a mass civic uprising had arrived. On April 17, I published a column in The New York Times arguing that all sectors of America needed to band together to create an interconnected resistance coalition.

That column got an enormous amount of attention and support. For a moment, I thought the mass civic uprising I was hoping for was at hand. So where is it? Yes, there were the (very good) “No Kings” rallies in June. And yes, groups such as Indivisible continue to organize conventional progressives. But for the most part, a miasma of passivity seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks.

...The problem with this strategy is that it allows dominance to become a habit. Bullies who go unresisted keep on dominating. Submission becomes a habit too. 

But a second reason people are quiescent is that they don’t understand the fight we are in. They’re still thinking in conventional political terms. This crisis is not about election cycles. It’s about historical tides. Every so often, a political-cultural-social tide sweeps the world, leaving everything rearranged in its wake. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the democratic tide swept across the West...

Trumpism, like populism, is more than a set of policies—it’s a culture. Trump offers people a sense of belonging, an identity, status, self-respect, and a comprehensive political ethic. Populists are not trying to pass this or that law; they are altering the climate of the age. And Democrats think they can fight that by offering some tax credits?

To beat a social movement, you must build a counter social movement.

A successful anti-MAGA movement must start by winning some achievable, concrete victory—halting this specific attack on democracy or that specific Trump program—and building from there. It must bring people from fear and stasis to hope and momentum...

The most effective form of communication for a social movement is action. Actions create events that tell stories. ...

Fourth course (From The New York Times, October 23, 2025): Dessert -- “The Unbearable Lightness of Beltway Conventional Wisdom Redux”.

Once again, chef’s whimsical tastes delivers a complete reversal: as the second course was a complete negation of the first, so now the fourth course shall be a complete negation of the third.  And once again, to prepare his signature nullification, chef shops the kitchen dumpster and simply repeats, nearly verbatim,  his PBS News Hour jeremiad against Democrats for using the one tool available to them to materially oppose the Trump regime.

Boiled in salted sanctimony, seasoned with performative bellyaching, crabbing and grousing.

The headline: "The Death of Democracy Is Happening Within You"

Summary:  Fucking Democrats are ruining everything.

The money quote: 

If the Democrats were a normal party that believed in democratic principles, they would have planned to go to the voters in the next elections and said: These Republican policies are terrible! You should vote for us!

But of course that’s not what the Democrats decided to do. Instead, they shut down the government. Why did they do that? Because we don’t live in a healthy democracy. We live in a country in which the norms, beliefs and practices that hold up a democracy are dying even in the minds of many of the people who profess to oppose Donald Trump.

Having choked down all four courses, we recommend our special house digestif, David Brooks' own choice of top-shelf, airport lounge liquor, “Le Bourbon de l’Absurdité” (The Bourbon of Absurdity).

A post-prandial triumph of aging Boomer bitterness,  “Le Bourbon de l’Absurdité” is hand-distilled in barrels made from the timbers of Edmund Burke's coffin, with notes of pretention, privilege and performative virtue. Each sip arrives in a crystal glass chilled with a single cube of glacial remorse.  Pretentious Drinker Magazine describes the experience as, "Comparable to Malort, if Malort cost $4,200 a bottle.  Sits in your mouth like an angry employee who refuses to believe they've been fired.  May have to call security.  Memorable."

Update:  I am heartened by the fact that the first jillion (and the most "Reader picked") comments were of this variety:

• Good try, Mr. Brooks. The high minded concept of both sides are to blame just doesn't resonate any more...


• Read the first part…. The Dems did not shut down the government.


• Apparently Mr. Brooks missed the “outcry” of 7M plus voices that took place last Saturday.  


• Democrats did not shut down the government.


• I have a been a student and then faculty at three universities since 1980 and I have worked with students and faculty at many others. Yes, many faculty are fairly liberal, yet I have never seen evidence to back your claim that "many professors decided their job was indoctrination, not truth-seeking. To impose power so that students think just like they do." 


• This piece makes some very good points, but it reeks of both-sides-ism. 


• No Mr Brooks. Democrats did not  "decide" to shut down the government. Democrats refused to support Republican cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.  Republicans refused to negotiate in good faith.


• When Trump seeks a 3rd term, will Brooks continue to bash on Democrats and seek new ways to try to convince the world that it's all Democrats' fault? 


• Brooks just can't shake his deep Republican roots. It must be extremely difficult for him to watch Trump destroy both his party and the nation.


• Brooks trots out the old indoctrination in universities trope to somehow balance out the absolute abandonment of democracy by the GOP and Trump. 


• The Democrats didn’t shut down government.  The Republicans have the House, the Senate, the White House (what’s left of it), and SCOTUS.  They could waive the filibuster in the Senate and pass their misery-inducing budget tomorrow.  They could reconvene the House and start negotiating. 


• The Republicans control the house, the senate, the executive branch and a conservative  biased SCOTUS. The shutdown of government is on them exclusively.  Authoritarian regimes don’t compromise and don’t care about persuasion. 


• Their  refusal to swear in  the Arizona democrat, who was elected,  is blocking the release of the Epstein files. If there is nothing in them, there would be no reason to block their release. This is all on the Republican Party.


• David Brooks condescension is annoying. Just because we don't have columns doesn't mean we're not paying attention. 


• I'm a prof, and as we only half jokingly say, "indoctrinate?!? I'd be happy if they read the syllabus".


• The GOP created the current impasse by refusing to negotiate, as legislators of both parties have done in the past in order to govern. There is only one party to blame here and it isn't the Democrats.


• The Democrats didn’t shutdown the government. The Republicans refused to negotiate and shutdown the government.


• I'm not sure how many more of Mr. Brooks' hot takes about how "both sides are bad" I can take.

Well done kids!

And my personal favorite:  "The comments section is closed."

I Am The Liberal Media

The Fascists and the Blind Men

Since all of us here are snobby Liberal elites, I assume you're all familiar with the parable of The Elephant and the Blind Men.  

If you're not, here it is, minus the happy ending where a Wise Man happens past and says, "Hey, you're all partially right!" and then they're all filled with joy and go off together and get drunk. and they all get jobs writing opinion pieces for The New York Times.

Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.”

They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, “Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway.” All of them went where the elephant was. Everyone of them touched the elephant.

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.

“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.

“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.

“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right....

Well this is not that story.

This is the story of four elite Conservatives who spent their entire careers willfully blinding themselves to the burgeoning rage, racism, paranoia, arrogant ignorance and lust for a dictator that was motivating the base of their party.

Instead, as they patted down the fascism at the heart of the Republican party,  they reported back to the world that...

“Unlike those heathen, gay-loving Liberals, the Republican party is deeply, sincerely and faithfully Christian,” said David French.

“Virtuous Republicans who care deeply about deficits and institutional norms are all that keep us safe from those Liberal monsters,” said Bret "Bug" Stephens.

"There will be no Trump coup,"  said His Eminence Ross Cardinal Douthat, primate of the Archdiocese of Dorkylvania.

“It's gonna be Rubio!” said David Brooks.

So today The New York Times has presented its readers with four extremely privileged, out-of-touch Conservative white dudes on the payroll of Times, all of whom have spent their entire professional lives being willfully blind to the monsters they were helping to spawn, and being utterly wrong about the one thing they were hired to have savvy opinions about based on their alleged expertise and insider knowledge: the state of play inside the Republican party, and what the Right was thinking and doing behind closed doors.    

Let's see how that worked out!

David Brooks: I’d add another phrase: “brokenism.” This is the belief system popularized by Alana Newhouse in Tablet magazine in 2022. It’s the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down. Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption.

Translation: I personally have no idea what's going on but I gonna say that I still have Trump-supporting friends for some reason and they tell me...

David French: In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other...

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Ross Douthat: I think there are all kinds of ways in which Trump’s popularity is connected to distinctive shifts in the culture in the last 15 years — the trends on both left and right that have boosted populists all over the Western world. But it’s also important to stress that part of what Republicans like about Donald Trump is just that Donald Trump is a Republican.

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides.  Also I don't have that much of a problem with Trump because he's mostly doing Republican stuff that I like.

Brooks: I’d offer up one more word for consideration: “exclusion.” Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions.

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Brooks: A lot of elite conservatives continue to struggle with what I call the near-abroad problem. They may dislike MAGA, but they (we) are mostly around progressives or moderates on a day-to-day basis, by virtue of being elite. These progressives sometimes make our teeth hurt. We react more strongly to minor sins of the people across campus than the major sins of the people far away. This is something I’m working on.

Translation:  We really don't know what we're talking about.  

Stephens:  The other point that can’t be emphasized enough: Trump wouldn’t be as popular as he is with his side of the country if Democrats and progressives weren’t as unpopular with most sides of the country. Just the fact that he drives the Rachel Maddows of the world into fits of rage and despair and thoughts of European exile is reason enough for many Americans to support him. Sometimes even including me.

Translation:  My bone-deep loathing of Liberals remains undimmed and I will exploit any opportunity to drag them into any subject for a little hippie punching.  

French: Those of us who follow politics closely always seem to forget that we’re the strange ones. I really question how much the average rank-and-file Republican even knows about most of these early controversies. If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets, you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, “woke” programs funded by U.S.A.I.D. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives that are at risk.

That means they won’t know, much less care, about any given political controversy until it affects them personally.

Translation:  We really don't know what we're talking about.  

Douthat: Second, I would emphasize that many Americans experienced the recent period of liberal power, especially under Covidian conditions, as much more authoritarian and lawless-feeling in its everyday impact ... than anything they experienced under Trump.

 Translation:  I'm with Stephens.  Liberals are the worst.

Stephens: ...some of what Trump is doing is simply a turbocharged version of what his liberal predecessors did while the mainstream press remained mostly mum. Remember Barack Obama’s threats of unilateral executive action through his phone and his pen? Or Joe Biden’s almost open flouting of the Supreme Court with his student loan forgiveness schemes? I also think millions of Americans are tuning out some of the claims of Trump’s unconstitutional behavior as so much partisan noise. That’s one of the downsides of some of the more doubtful efforts by liberal prosecutors to put Trump in jail.

Translation:  Have I mentioned that I still really, really fucking hate Liberals and will use any opportunity to drag them into any subject for a little hippie punching? Also Liberals are really to blame for everything.

French: ... We’ve seen this pattern throughout the Trump years. Trump will advance an illegal or unconstitutional policy, MAGA lawyers will spring to MAGA media to rationalize and justify it, and then, when even conservative judges or justices block Trump’s actions, they scream that the courts are lawless, not Trump.

Translation:  Fuck you, Stephens.  I'm an actual lawyer not some DEI hire from the Wall Street Journal brought on because Cardinal Douthat here wasn't red meat wingnut enough for the five MAGA rubes who Sulzberger believes still read his paper.  

French: It’s so important to distinguish between the core of MAGA — which dominates discourse online — from the bulk of voters who put Trump back in the White House.

driftglass: No it's not.  If they're not out-and-proud fascists, they extremely cool with being out-and-proud fascist-adjacent.  Fuck 'em all:  the three-strikes rule applies to everyone who voted for Trump during his third run for the White House.

Douthat: It’s not unique to MAGA, though — real partisans don’t change their vote just because the economy goes bad, and especially not under polarized conditions. It’s not like the inflation under Biden suddenly made partisan Democrats...

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Stephens: Well, Treasury Secretary Bessent is right. Market corrections are healthy. Recessions should sometimes happen.

Translation:  Let them eat cake.

Healy: Trump calling for the impeachment of that judge — and the notion of impeaching or disregarding judges generally whom Trump disagrees with.

Stephens: Terrible. I only stop to observe that all the liberals who went berserk over John Roberts’s nomination to the court 20 years ago owe the chief justice an apology...

Translation:  I am so consumed by my hatred of Liberals that there is nothing left inside of me, and it's really, really unfair that Trump's awfulness makes it harder to devote every word in every column I write to the subject of just how monstrous Liberals are.  

Stephens: Musk is off to a bad start in his government career, but I sincerely wish him success. The federal government isn’t just too big, it’s obese. Elon may yet be its Ozempic.

Translation:  Burn it all down -- I'll bring the marshmallows!  -- except for the parts I like.  

Douthat: We are two months into the presidency, and we just lived through four years of dramatic global and domestic upheaval under a Democratic president whose manifest incapacity was deliberately concealed from the country. I have a million concerns about where this administration is going, but it’s a bit soon to attack the president’s supporters for being irrationally loyal.

Translation:  I'm with Stephens.  Democrats are the worst.

In conclusion, while the four New York Times Conservatives columnists did collectively manage to blame both sides, express their unalloyed contempt for people like me, and confess that they have no idea what people outside of their tiny cossetted bubble of privilege think about a damn thing, they very definitely did not pinpoint why the reprogrammable meatbag base of the Republicans party love Trump more than before.

For the answer to that question they would need to stop sniffing each others Buckley farts and ask any one of us who A) live well outside their tiny cossetted bubble of privilege and, B) have been writing about the Republican party for 20 years now.  

Which they will never do because an honest answer would, well...

It is one of the more amusing ironies of our age that while elite New York Times Conservatives (and The Atlantic Conservatives, and The Bulwark Conservatives, and so on) may be anathema to the Republican MAGA base, both groups detest Liberals for exactly the same reason:  our existence and our decades of warnings make both groups look stupid.

I Am The Liberal Media

Rush Who? Newt Who?

Never heard of them.

While fighting off this stupid cough that interrupted our podcasting schedule, for my sins I listened to Mona Charen's "new" podcast interviewing David French.  

I listened all the way to the end, and I have some thoughts.  Many thoughts.  So, before we begin --

-- I am contractually obliged to contextualize the interview for you.

Charen and French represent the moral and intellectual pillars of the Right.  The one, unique thing they supposedly brought to every table and panel and podcast and program to which they were invited (and they were invited to a lot of them) was their penetrating insight into politics.  It's why The Bulwark hired Charen.  It's why The New York Fucking Times whitewashed French's inconvenient past and added him to their already top-heavy lineup of  Conservative opinion-havers.

Because these guys, above all others, knew the skinny.  They knew the deal -- the real deal.  They were tight with the shot-callers.  They were in the little rooms with the Big Thinkers who were making the Big Decisions.  They could be trusted to reliably report on what was really going on deep in the heart of Conservatism.  And, even more important than all of that, they knew all what all of us sneaky terrorist-loving, Murrica-hating, baby-killing, commie Liberals were up to with our schemey schemes.    

Using their credentials and character-references from all the other unimpeachable pillars of Conservative credibility, they spent decades stamping their imprimatur all over reassurances that the Right was, in every way, oh so much better than the petty, addled, hateful Left.   More noble.  More thoughtful.  More respectful of the rule of law.  More decent.  More honest.  More generous.  More virtuous.  

In fact, the Right was so incomparably superior to the Left in every way, that there was barely any point in comparing the two.

So, please read the following excerpts which I have faithfully transcribed in the knowledge that this is how people like Charen and French were regarded by the Right and the legacy media, and it was the basis of this unique expertise that they have been paied  as writers and speakers.  

Ahem.

FRENCH:  But here's what ... I'm more worried about, us, the American people.  Because if you ... what [Trump is] also doing is he's fostering in his followers the same hatred that he feels.  And so what when I learned this, y'know, I, in 2016 I voted third party. And 2020 I voted third party.  In 2024 I voted for the Democrat -- for Kamala Harris. First time I ever voted for a Democrat for president in my life. And when I wrote about that the blowback from ordinary people, like, ordinary Republicans that I know was really surprising to me.  Especially considering that they knew I hadn't voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. 

FYI, being taken completely by surprise by things Liberals have been writing about and warning about for decades is going to be kind of a theme here.     

FRENCH:   But they had been so inculcated with this hyper-partisanship, of Democrats as "Demoncrats", and the dehumanization of their political opponents that they really saw me as joining the enemy of the country.  Whereas if I was... if I'd voted third party again they would view me as sitting out the fight.  By voting for the Democrats they viewed me as joining the other side, and it's that internal hatred that is the fuel for this fire.  And that's what I'm more worried about than any specific actions.  Because all of these actions are empowered by that hatred.  And then Trump milks it and fuels it and fuels it.  And so I don't know, Mona, what we do with all that hatred after Trump leaves the scene?

Then, after some hand-waving and throat clearing about how awful the Elites are (that's you and me) and how "they" look down on Christians...

FRENCH:  ...and then, when I got on the wrong side of the Christian conservative World by not supporting Donald Trump what I experienced was something worse than anything I'd had experienced at the hands of the left...

Then after still more hand-waving and throat clearing about how awful the Left was on few college campuses...

FRENCH:  ...and so then I began to hear the stories of... and when I got, y'know uh my feet in, when I got in mainstream media [ed. he means, when the New York Fucking Times whitewashed his record and gave him a job], um, I began to hear stories from people who had interacted with Christian conservatives and the stories of hatred and vitriol and abuse were horrifying.  And, so, y'know one of the things that I wish I could say is, like, go back and go to these churches where they say "Why are they looking down on us?" and say guys you don't know what other people in the pews around you are saying and doing to your opponents.  And if you could sit... if you  could walk a mile in their shoes you would know this.  You would know that if I cross the Evangelical conservative movement I can expect terrible things. Terrible treatment.  Horrible treatment.  Threats.  I can expect threats.  I can expect intimidation.  I can expect the worst kind of name calling and slander. 

Then more throat clearing about how most Conservative evangelicals are not this way.  

Really?  And how the fuck would you know that?  After all, you claim you had no fucking clue about any of this heinous shit your chosen party, your chosen movement and your chosen faith were up to until it bit you personally in the ass.  

FRENCH: ... but I've gotten to the point where I'm not... I'm ... the fact that you are sitting in institutions in which many, many, many of the members in good standing are abusing their fellow citizens and you don't do anything about it...

...but when you're a part of a movement and you're part of an institution that is supposed to be following the person of Jesus Christ and it doesn't alarm you when you hear of all of the abuse towards critics etc. emanating from your own institutions? And that doesn't alarm you? Uh, that is that is very difficult to deal with, Mona. 

No shit, Sherlock. 

FRENCH:   It's very difficult to deal with the fact that there is such indifference to the suffering that their own institution inflicts on its critics.

Golly, if only there had been some sort of warning.  A hint.  Some subtle clue that Conservative Evangelical are monstrous hypocrites. 

Fun Fact:  In two months it will be the 20th anniversary of "Little Red State Fundy".  I am so fucking tired of these people.  

Then it was Mona Charen's turn for some throat clearing about how she used to get some hate mail from the Left, and how "people" would compliment her on how brave she was to be out there in the world calling Liberals naughty bad people.  And then...

CHAREN:  But when I got on the wrong side of MAGA, um, it was off the charts. I mean, on Twitter in 2015 to 2016, uh that was when I first started getting the unbelievable misogynistic antisemitic... y'know, uh all of that stuff, hatred aimed at me, um, y'know, the contempt that, y'know.  And so I ... I have a limited amount of sympathy for the people who are constantly saying how, y'know, we really need to understand that MAGA is just a reaction to the way they're being badly treated...

Here's more good news!  After 40 years of playing dumb, these two brain wizards seem to have finally cracked the code for how Conservative propaganda works!   

FRENCH:  ...but this sort of idea that a lot of people take so personally in their own lives -- they're so personally offended in their own lives by the disdain, like, that the Women's Studies Department in Oberlin might have for them.

CHAREN: I know... I know!

FRENCH:  When they have nothing to do with their lives, y'know.

CHAREN: Exactly!

FRENCH:  But I think what.. what also happens, you have to realize, a lot of the business model of right-wing media is to go find the most contemptuous leftist...

CHAREN: Yep! 

FRENCH:  ...and put them front and center and saying "Look and see what they think of you!"

CHAREN: Yes! 

FRENCH:  ... and they're not representative.  They're not the normal person left of center.  But it's all about sort of feeding the sense of grievance.

CHAREN: Yep.

Also, did you know that Republican voters are morons?  Yeah, its true! They don't actually sit around pondering the deficit and quoting Edmund Burke.  In fact, they don't know fuck all about anything! 

FRENCH: Trump couldn't return without civic ignorance at mass scale.  And so what's what you saw if you looked at the data was that amongst the people who are well informed about the news, Kamala Harris won those people pretty substantially.  Trump won people very substantially who got their news from nowhere at all.

Mr. French, Ms. Charen, those are your people you're talking about.  Your people and your party.  

And since you have now succeeded in making your failure my problem, this would be an excellent time to consider spending the rest of your lives apologizing to those of us who warned you this would happen, and who will have to spend the rest of our lives cleaning up your catastrophe.  

 

Burn The Lifeboats

A Murderer's Row Of Legacy Media Garbage

I know what you're wondering.

You're wondering, "What it the plural form of 'status quo?"

I understand because this is the sort of question that keeps me up at night.  Fortunately I have access to The Google, and now the answer be told:

status quos or (rare) statuses quo or (rare, hypercorrect) stati quo

And given what you know about me, you know which option speaks to me. 

Ahem.

Within the legacy media there it not just one terrible status quo doctrine which must be defended at all costs.   There are multiple, terrible stati quo doctrines which must be defended.  Here are three of them, each from a legacy media thought leader.

1.  Liberals just don't understand.

It is an article of faith within the legacy political media that, whatever some Never Trump has just now figured out, it is the first time anyone anywhere has figured whatever-it-is out and it it now their solemn duty to use their huge media platform to explain it to the po' dump Liberal who have no clue.  

And so...

What Liberals Miss About the MAGA Movement

David French explores what keeps Trump’s followers hooked.

Sept. 19, 2024

I first started writing about the MAGA movement in late 2015. Like a lot of people, I didn’t initially take Trump seriously, but very quickly, I realized this was very serious and he was absolutely resonating. And so, I began talking to friends, to relatives. Why? What is it about Donald Trump that appeals to you so much? And that conversation has never really stopped for nine years.

I knew that MAGA was going to take this torch and carry it as far as it possibly could. And they did it in that particular way that MAGA interacts with the larger world, with this sense of gleeful transgression. They have fun being outrageous. They have fun being provocative. They like to “trigger the libs.” What MAGA is very good at doing is turning around back to its own people and saying, “See, we struck a nerve.” They’ll use words like, “If you’re taking flack, it means you’re over the target.” And so they use the backlash almost as proof that they’ve hit a nerve and all of this just creates an endless process of doubling down.

And one thing that I think that liberals tend to miss about the MAGA movement is they miss its underlying sense of community and its joy. So there is a strong sense of belonging within MAGA and they have a great time being MAGA...

This is the Tribe That Rubs This In Their Hair, about which I have been writing about since even before I made character actor and unhinged wingnut lunatic Nick Searcy cry like a little bitch and run away:

These are genuine charter members of the Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair -- my shorthand for the Conservative mutual masturbation society whose lunacy grows exponentially more unhinged when excitedly puppy-piling their batshit nonsense among themselves -- who happily rub shit in their hair because everyone else in the club is doing it...

The key takeaway from David French is not that we silly, addlepated Liberals don't really understand what's going on inside the Republican party.  The key takeaway is that David French spent his entire adult life writing right-wing garbage for outfits like the National Review while turning a blind eye to what was going on inside his Republican party until it was far, far too late.  

I first started writing about the MAGA movement in late 2015. Like a lot of people, I didn’t initially take Trump seriously, but very quickly, I realized this was very serious 

But of course it's far too psychologically painful and professionally inconvenient for him to admit that the Left has actually be right about the Right all along.  So he just erases us and replaces us with imaginary Liberals who need to have all this complicated, grownup political stuff explained to them in little words.  

2.  Trump Hijacked The Modern Republican Party.

It is vitally important to virtually every legacy media Conserative influencer of the first water to continue to maintain the the Republican party was just fine until Trump showed up one day and, overnight, somehow mesmerized tens of millions of them into voting for him over and over again.  

Millions of pixels have been spilt by Liberal writers over the past decade (including your 'umbel scrivner) definitely proving over and over again that this is sheer bunkum.  That the rot at the heart of the GOP began long before Trump arrives.  That all of those now-shocked!shocked legacy media pundits were either blissfully oblivious to what was actually happening inside the GOP for decades , or were perfectly sanguine about it because building a party base of Fox-News addicted bigots and imbeciles was winning them elections.  Either way, those now-shocked!shocked legacy media pundits spent a whole lot of time and energy dismissing anyone who was speaking the truth about the GOP as crackpot alarmists...

...until that party base finally manifested its perfect avatar. Someone who spoke their hateful language, fully endorsed their grievances and paranoia, and shared their debased "values".  Donald Trump.  At which point those now-shocked!shocked legacy media pundits had to scramble for an explanation for the existence and persistence that not show them to have been wrong all along.  And they're still scrambling.

Take it away David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour (referring to Mark "I'm a Black Nazi" Robinson)

Brooks:  ...It's nastiness, and mind-boggling nastiness.

Well, what it says is the Republican Party used to be a normal party, which had the normal vetting procedures. Like, you were a College Republican, and then you got vetted by your local state assembly, and then — so you had a normal — like any industry, basically, that there's a whole series of structures that people who are just complete opportunists and degenerates, if I can use that word, don't pass through the system.

But that whole system was wiped away. And so, ever since the Trump era came in...

No, David.  That system was a fraud, and you and your various "respectable" employers were a deeply complicit it perpetrating that fraud on the American public for decades.

It's not a hijacking or a theft or a hostile takeover when the base of the party hands a madman the keys and begs him to take them wherever he wants.  

And finally...inevitably.  The big one.  

3.  Both Sides Do It (And Democrats Are Solely Responsible For Fixing Everything.)

Because Chuck Todd had been given the hook off the the Meet the Press set and replaced by the equally awful Kristin Welker, you may have been under the misapprehension that NBC had actually fired Chuck Todd fired for incompetence, or he had been sent update to play with other disgraced former network political anchors, or had suddenly been summoned back to his home planet for some reason.

 But no.  Chuck Todd is still NBC News' Chief Political Analyst, still cranks out a newsletter on a regular basis, and his wretched Both Siderist stank is still very much in evidence everywhere.  

For example, here, on NBC's very own website.  With emphasis added to aid you the reader.

Chuck Todd: What if we can't unite?

...Let’s be honest: The current level of political discourse is unsustainable for this democracy. Maybe it doesn’t break us this year, maybe not next. But unless we choose to rise above it, either by electing de-escalators rather than purveyors of zero-sum political pugilism or by demanding that the big tech companies stop creating algorithms...

De-escalators?  You mean like Barack Obama?  Hey Chuck, remind me again how the Right reacted to the election of Barack Obama.

Chuckles the Clown continues:

The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are....

 "We"?  Who the fuck is this "We" you're talking about.

Chuckles continues:

And that brings me back to what happened over the weekend. Be honest with yourself — while the news was surprising Sunday, it sadly wasn’t very shocking. Spend 10 minutes doom-scrolling on your social media app of choice and you will be served up examples of outrage and demonization that can do one of two things: make you shake your head about the state of the country and leave the platform in disgust or anger you and get you to engage even more, usually by contributing wittingly or unwittingly to demonizing “the other side.”

And, yes, I’m being intentionally vague with these descriptions because this type of behavior isn’t limited to one set of partisans...

No, you're being intentionally vague because if you were clear and specific everyone could see how completely full of shit you are. 

Chuckles continues:

It’s why it’s hard to take seriously the outrage from some in Trump’s orbit that it’s the Democrats and their media allies who have created the more violent conditions in our political landscape. For every complaint the right surfaces about discourse it says could have been triggering, there is a slew of pugilistic personal attacks that Trump has made himself and directed at Americans by name, putting them in harm’s way.

But just because Trump started it doesn’t mean his opponents have the high moral ground when they single out him and some of his supporters for personal derision. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”...

There it is. Chuckles' irredeemable corrupt statement of corporate media morality.  Of course, it's bad when terrible people do terrible things, but it is equally bad (maybe worse!) to say true things about those terrible people and the terrible things they are doing.  

Chuckles continues with a sermonette on Both Siderism worthy of David Fucking Brooks at his worst:

Sadly, so much of our political discourse features people rationalizing their bad behavior by claiming the other side is worse.

Who are these "people"?  Where do they live?  What, specifically, are they saying?  Are the numbers of these imaginary "people" actually equivalent on both sides?  Can Chuckles cite any actual examples of any of this at all?

Of course not.  Because would smack of "journalism" which, I am sure, doesn't appear anywhere in the job description of an NBC News' Chief Political Analyst.

Chuckles continues:

My friends on the left love to scream about both sides-isms and love to complain when some of us hold them to a higher standard than Trump.

First, Chuckles has no friends on the Left.  

Second, way to go team!  I know as a matter of fact that it has been readers of this blog and others, and listeners to the Professional Left Podcast, that have been the most tireless missionaries on social media spreading the Good News that Both Sides Don't.  

And you know what?  It worked!  The message of the Both Sides Don't movement has penetrated so deeply into enemy territory the NBC News' Chief Political Analyst now has to acknowledge that it exists and where it's coming from...before dismissing it with one of the weakest, most pusillanimous excuses I have ever heard.

But the party that promises a higher standard is asking to be judged by a higher standard. This doesn’t mean anyone is condoning the bad behavior of the other side, but it means that if you ask the voters to expect better, you should always behave better, period... 

This is goalpost-moving on a rocket sled.  Sure, Donald Trump is a degenerate, racist, rapist monster, and that's all really bad.  But if actually saying true things about Donald Trump and the Republican party is objectively worse because...reasons.

 I would never expect Chuckles to sit down on a panel with actual Liberals armed to the teeth with receipts.  He much too gutless for that.  But it would be hilarious to sit him down at a panel with, say, David French and David Brooks that is moderated by, say, me and watch these three legacy media stati quo crash with each other.  

After all, because Brooks pretends that Trump broke the Republican party, he feels free to refer to candidate vetting process as one that produces "opportunists and degenerates".  Candidates which don't just have skeletons in their closet, but whole "morgues in their closet."

David French says MAGA is  

...trashing our body politic. They’re wrecking, in many ways, the G.O.P., but they are having a good time and hey, the people they’re making mad, they don’t like them anyway.

And you might think for a minute that, well, wait, this can’t go on forever. Surely, surely the majority of Republicans, when they know they’ve been had, when they know these are lies, will stop paying attention to these memes. They’ll reject this method.

And the really sad answer is that the Republican response to Jan. 6 and the Big Lie showed us the tolerance that Republicans have for dishonesty and for lying if it is directed against their hated Democratic enemies. 

A lot of people are looking at these transparent lies, obvious falsehoods, baseless accusations, and saying, “How is this happening again? Why are we here again?” And one of the answers, quite frankly, is that MAGA has a lot of fun doing this. 

 (And not for nuthin', but my-oh-my you should hear what kind of salty language many prominent legacy media Never Trumpers use to accurately describe what is going on with the Republican party.  They almost sound like [checks notes] Liberal bloggers circa 2004!)

There is no way to describe the atrocities on the Right without describing them as atrocities, and there is no way to correctly characterize the villainy and depravity of those enacting and applauding those atrocities without describing them as depraved villains.  So how does Chuckles propose to square this circle? 

Well...he doesn't, because he doesn't give a shit about any of this.  His years laboring in the legacy media vineyards have taught him only one skill:  how to concoct what he believes to be excellent "gotcha" questions with which to trip up Democrats.

But to these tired eyes, it appears that, very slowly, at least some prominent Progressives/Liberals/Democrats are starting to figure out how not to get tripped up by Todd's absurd goalpost-moving, or Brooks' ridiculous revisionist history, or French's laughable idea that the actions and motives of Republicans need to be explained to the very same Liberals who were warning about the actions and motives of Republicans during all the years when David French was lying about it.

And it's so easy!

#1:  Fuck David French.

#2:  Fuck David Brooks.

And #3:  Fuck Chuck todd.

I Am The Liberal Media

The Conservative Road to Damascus is a Merry-Go-Round

It just goes around and around, over and over again, and always ends up in the same place.

If you have been paying attention you may have noticed this trend over at Conservative, Inc.

Every few months for the past eight years or so, some prominent Conservative out there who has cadged for  themselves a sweet media gig based on their Superior Knowledge of The Subject of Politics and Conservatism stumbles over the fact that something they believed to have been inviolable Conservative orthodoxy was bullshit all along.  

In fact, history has shown that, with the exception of Beltway pundits, no group has been more loudly, repeatedly and disastrously wrong about the true nature of the Republican party and the Conservative movement than [checks notes] elite Republicans and Conservatives.  

Yet somehow they all still have elite mainstream media jobs.

And you know who turns out to have been right about the Right all along?  

Yeah.  That's right.  Us America-hating, terrorist-loving, godless, commie, baby-killing Liberals.  Whose are all still treated like pariahs by the mainstream media.

Over and over again.  Around and around the Conservative Epiphany Merry-Go-Round goes.

This post started out as an examination of this New York Times op-ed last week by David French:

The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Movement

Maybe a blog post of tsk-tsking.  Maybe revisiting the hurry-up-quick way that French tidied up his extremely problematic professional history enough for the Sulzberger family -- who are always thirsty for yet another Conservative to bring under the Times' banner -- to put him on payroll.  

But I set all that aside over the busy travel/socializing weekend, which was  followed by time spent errand-running and podcast prepping and doing, and when I came back to the subject of David French, I wanted to widen the aperture a little.  

After all, French is in no way unique.  Not the only one who, after decades of living La Vida Falwell, "suddenly" noticed a glitch in the Republican Jebus Matrix at exactly the same moment that Donald Trump ripped the mask off the Republican party and showed the world who they had really been all along. 

Before he passed, I wrote dozens of posts about the late Michael Gerson's long, strange journey from Evangelical thug and key advisor and speechwriter for George W.Bush...to his gig at The Washington Post where he spent eight years relentlessly savaging President Obama in very unChristian terms...to his very slowly dawning realization that his Republican party really was going to nominate Donald Trump...to his very slowly dawning realization that his Conservative Evangelical movement was, in fact, 100% cool with Donald Trump.

It's been a well-trod path, this denial!denial!denial! decade after decade that anything was fundamentally wrong on the Right.   That to win elections, the Republican party had been filling itself up with garbage people for decades: bigots and imbeciles whose votes and viewer attention had been purchased by way of promises of all sorts of nonsense by party elites.  

And, just like the collapse of the housing market, it turns out that all the specialists and experts and journalists who were supposed to be keeping an eye on the basic soundness of the system were profiting from looking the other way.  

But rather that going along with the increasingly absurd reportage from the cloistered garden of the Beltway media about the state of American democracy, there were a few of us out here in the Real World telling a very different story about what we were seeing and hearing.  

And, just as happened with the collapse of the housing market, anyone who was out there contradicting the received wisdom of the Beltway media was dismissed as a crackpot and an alarmist, because all the Very Serious People just knew that foundations of American democracy were rock-solid.  That the two-party system was functioning as it should.  

It's gonna be Rubio!

And when it all fell down, how uncanny it was -- how deeply uncomfortable it made all those Very Serious People -- that the real Republican party turned out to be just as we America-hating, godless commie Liberals had been describing it all along.  A party of bigots and imbecile, grifters and demagogues, cynics, fascists, homophobes, oligarchs and collaborators which those professionals with Superior Knowledge of The Subject of Politics and Conservatism like Michael Gerson and David French had denied and denied and denied existed at all.

But Gerson was a real trooper, and even as the political and ideological movements to which he had devoted his entire adult life were shown to have been colossal frauds, he never retracted any of the slander he spent eight years heaping on Obama and Democrats, never stopped pretending that his Republican party had lost its mind suddenly and with no warning, never stopped trying to blame Both Sides, never stopped trying to Tone Police us dirty hippies, and, of course, never lost his gig at The Washington Post just because he had been horribly wrong about everything.  

Comes now David French, who, to his credit, actually gets a little further down the road than Gerson ever did when he acknowledges that "many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along":

I still believe there are many deeply sincere pro-life Americans. I see their anger in response to Trump’s statements, even when they’ve previously supported him. They are people who genuinely believe that all human life is precious and should be protected from conception until natural death.

But I also recognize that many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along. When push came to shove, the pro-life position was either secondary to other values or it genuinely was punitively tribal — enthusiastically aimed straight at the supposedly licentious left but ready to be abandoned the instant the commitment to unborn children might endanger the larger MAGA political project. Abortion is the poison pill that Trump doesn’t want to swallow.

And at no extra charge, Mr. French also got a little taste of the brand of Evangelical Christian love and forgiveness that his side had been handing out to us America-hating, terrorist-loving, dirty, commie hippies for as long as I can remember:

At its worst, the pro-life movement was also deeply cynical. Many of its members have spent the last eight years mocking and bullying pro-life conservatives who’ve refused to support Trump, even when we rightly said he was a terrible ambassador for a virtuous cause. I’ve been called a baby-killer or murderer or heretic more times than I can count.

Mr. French ends on this note:

The older I get, the more I’m convinced that we simply don’t know who we are — or what we truly believe — until our values carry a cost. For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has made the case that life begins at conception. Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed. Yet the Republican Party can’t live with its own philosophy...

But I choose to end on this one.  It's from Ayn Rand's crappy science fiction novel "Atlas Shrugged", but it seems too appropriate not to appropriate:

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish.

Bonus Content.  

This is from Time Magazine, February 07, 2005.  Nearly 20 years ago.  Same issue, in fact, in which Michael Gerson was named one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals".

Give it a read and and see how the dangerous trajectory the Republican party was already on was clearly visible to any reasonable person who bothered to pay attention:

Does Bush Owe the Religious Right?

...

What do they think Bush owes them? His campaign barely had time to sweep up the confetti last Nov. 3 before the victorious President got a congratulatory bouquet of praise, threats, warnings and demands. "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America — though she doesn't deserve it — a reprieve from the agenda of paganism," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the namesake South Carolina university that his grandfather founded to foster "Christ-like" character. "Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing." But if Jones saw the victory as an opportunity to be seized, others were preaching the biblical virtues of patience and caution. "Can we handle success and increased influence with grace and prudence?" Watergate conspirator turned prison evangelist Chuck Colson wrote in a column. "Sad to say, the church has managed to shoot itself in the foot almost every time it has achieved power in society. So what we need right now is a bracing dose of humility."

Having helped wage a presidential campaign over big issues like a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, conservative Christians are not likely to be content winning skirmishes like the one that newly installed Education Secretary Margaret Spellings fought last week against the cartoon character Buster, famous for being Arthur's best friend. She objected to one episode that featured Buster visiting a real-life lesbian couple in Vermont. After her warning about the dangers of exposing young viewers to "the lifestyles portrayed in the episode," PBS decided not to distribute the show to its 350 publicly financed stations.

As Bush begins his last term in the White House, the voters who believe they did more than anyone else to put him there are asking themselves and him: What now? And when, if not now? "He's not the typical politician who 'understands' us," says Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. "He's one of us."

...

Evangelical activists, for their part, say that as Bush looks forward, he should also look back. They claim that what brought churchgoing Christians (including a record number of Hispanics) to the polls more than any other issue last year was gay marriage. Initiatives banning it were on the ballot in 11 states and passed in every one, overwhelmingly in almost every case. So religious groups were startled and angry when Bush, bowing to what he said were political realities, seemed to signal in a pre-Inaugural interview with the Washington Post that he would not press the Senate to pass the federal ban.

The reverberations came almost instantly. Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who sends a daily e-mail to 125,000 Christian activists, says his computer mailbox was jammed with hundreds of complaints, many lamenting, "I worked my heart out for this guy." The Arlington Group, a coalition of conservative religious organizations, quickly fired off to Bush political guru Karl Rove a private letter signed by such figures as Bauer, Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, conservative standard bearer Paul Weyrich and evangelist Jerry Falwell. They laid down a none-too-subtle threat that the Administration's "defeatist attitude" on gay marriage might make it "impossible for us to unite our movement on an issue such as Social Security privatization where there are already deep misgivings."

I Am The Liberal Media

Hiring Policies and Procedures

Last post I told you the next post would be about the hiring practices at The New York Times.  So here we go.

In the course of my checked life and misspent youth, I have held many jobs.  From stock boy at a Sears store which no longer exists, to a software developer during the pioneering days of the commercial internet for an insurance company which no longer exists, to a senior executive at a City of Chicago department which no longer exists.  

Hey, wait a tic.  Am I sensing some sort of...pattern here?

Nah.  Probably nothing.  

Anyway, lots of jobs doing lots of things.  

Now take a deep breath because here comes a long paragraph.  

But in all of my many and varied professional experiences, which included both getting hired and hiring others, and getting sacked and sacking others, I have never, in my life, been at a workplace, humble or grand, at which a someone had been hired with great fanfare on the basis of their claim to have a very specific and unique kind of expertise ... then were paid a lot of money for that very specific and unique kind of expertise ... then they publicly confess that they have no such expertise and, in fact, had never had any idea what they were talking about ... and were nonetheless retained by their employers in that very prestigious position.   

Resume padding?  Sure.  Seen it.

Sketchy references? Yes, I have been a friend's "Vandelay Industries".

But those are, on the whole, minor infractions.  Instead, imagine you're running a high-end restaurant and you hire a woman who says she did four years at The French Laundry as chef pâtissier.  Then you put her in the kitchen and tell her to make her magic, and an hour later you find her at her station, starting at a block of chocolate and a blob of dough.  The floor is littered with broken eggs, and she is  muttering, "I... I don't know what this is."

Or imagine the contractor you hired to build you a deck has shown up with a truck load of mulch, popcorn and a can opener, and he confides that he has, in fact, never joined two pieces of wood together in his life.  

Which brings me around to  the subject of The New York Times' most recent wingnut affirmative action hire:  David French.  I guess their pages weren't already larded with enough horrible Elite Conservatives Thought Pieces from David Brooks and Bret "Bug" Stephens and Stephens' ex-wife Pauline Paul and Ross Douthat, which is why Arthur Gregg Sulzberger drove the NYT labor van down to the National Review parking lot and David August French was the first one who jumped it.

French came laden with a deeply problematic past-- 

Just what we didn’t need: Another asshole @nytopinion columnist saying conservatives *discounting the Black experience* (!!) are no more extreme than lefty excess in trying to create inclusive environments on college campuses. Then denying he said so. https://t.co/XVGAz62Zxf pic.twitter.com/wip3f3fIWL

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) February 5, 2023

-- which he quickly "rethought" while in the NYT labor van en route to the paper's Op-Ed page.  So, one year ago, in January of 2023, there he was, up on the Times' Opinions masthead, announced with all the attendant fanfare.  

The NYT explained they brought him on as "[an] expert on the law, faith and politics" and praised him for his "factual and intellectual clarity" and "moral seriousness".  But mysteriously, the words "Republican" or "Conservative" are nowhere to be found in his official Times' C.V.

So, as you read the rest of this, keep in mind that French's factual clarity and political expertise are two of the specific skills which landed him at the Times.  

From David French, 1/25/2024:

Never Trumpers Never Had a Chance

By David French

And immediately I have a problem.  Literally any Liberal who writes about politics with "factual clarity" could have (and did) tell you this back in 2016.  So how is this breaking news for the Times' newest Conservative Thought Leader?

Ah well.  Moving on.

The Republican presidential primary is all but over.

We already know that.  Move on.

It’s déjà vu all over again. Since the moment Trump took the G.O.P. primary lead in 2015, he’s never relinquished his hold on the party.

We already know that.  Move on.

And since Trump’s hostile takeover and unexpected 2016 victory...

Hey dummy, it's not a "hostile takeover" if the party throws him the keys and begs him to drive.  Move on.

French then notes the many Democratic victories since the GOP gave itself over, body and soul, to the Umber Grifter.  

Then...

This is in part because while Democrats have been able to mobilize an effective anti-Trump opposition, conservative Never Trumpers — Republicans and former Republicans like me who have desperately tried to break Trump’s grip on the party — mostly failed.

Because as we have been telling you since two days after Trump came down the fucking escalator,  Trump is the Republican party.  He speaks to them in their mother tongue, because he is a manifestation of the rage and racism and resentment that Conservative media knocking-shops like [checks notes] Mr. French's former employers has spend decades feeding to the GOP base.

And then comes the kicker (with emphasis added):

It’s now clear to me that we never had a chance. And the reason is equally clear: We did not truly understand our own party.

No.  You didn't.  And I can only begin to imagine the enormous psychological resources that men like David French had to employ to hold themselves in a such a state of willful delusion about things that were happening right in front of them all along.  Such a state of willful delusion that they made their living, decade after decade, propagandizing tirelessly on behalf of a party and movement that existed only in their imaginations.   Lying to themselves so aggressively every day.  Having to shut their  eyes tighter and tighter to blot out the madness that was blossoming right there in their own garden so they could go on writing about the awful, amoral and dangerous Barack Obama and the Democrats.  

French then stops to light a candle at the shrine of St. Reagan, and swaddle himself in the fading, righteous warmth of the Good Old Days of the "disgraceful and unlawful" Bill Clinton.

Then...

No one would claim that every conservative had character ... but I refused to believe that the G.O.P. would broadly excuse, rationalize or defend a Bill Clinton in our midst.

Yes, in French's telling, Trump is "a Bill Clinton in our midst."   Fuck you.

Then...

I wasn’t just wrong; I was completely, embarrassingly wrong. The winds were shifting. I could sense it, but I didn’t fully understand it. Not until Trump made it all plain.

We warned you. 

Reviewing old essays by conservatives opposed to Trump, the most persistent complaint was simple: The man wasn’t a “real” conservative. At the same time, others among us remembered the Christian conservative outcry against Clinton’s infidelity, and believed that an argument about character would pull believers away from Trump’s grasp.

But no. 

When we told you, over and over again, that you were building an army of reprogrammable meatbags you would never be able to control, this is what we were talking about.

If animosity toward Democrats was the primary Republican value, even more than ideology or character, you can see how Never Trumpers were destined to fail. 

When you were warned over and over that you were building an Doomsday Machine with no "off" switch, and that it would destroy everything, this is what we were talking about:

The central problem is that when animosity toward Democrats is the primary value, any critique of Trump has to end the instant it’s perceived to help or signal agreement with Democrats.

 And finally:

I don’t regret my arguments against Trump. I’d make them again, and I will continue making them. I do ask myself how I missed the sheer extent of Republican anger. And I’m deeply, deeply grieved by the thought that I did anything in my life before Trump to contribute to that unrighteous rage.

I don't ask myself how people like French -- recently-former Republicans who have since colonized the "Liberal" media -- missed every single thing of importance that was happening right out in the open the whole time.  They were too busy making a living inventing scary stories about Liberals and feminists and people of color and Hillary and campus speech codes and LGBTQ+ people and The Kenyan Usurper and feeding those stories to the meatheads to notice or care about the long-term catastrophe they were courting.

What I do ask myself every day is why men like David French have been awarded the lucrative and prestigious jobs they have?  Because men like French didn't just passively miss everything: they spent their adult lives energetically working for Team Evil to build the Doomsday Machine that now threatens to destroy everything we value.  

It's great that French finally figured out what we Liberals figured out decades ago.  And that he feels really bad about not noticing it before now.

But what I ask myself every day is how such a person, who confesses to have been staggeringly wrong all along about the one fucking subject he was supposed to know better than almost anyone else got hired by The New York Times to write about that subject on the basis of his "factual and intellectual clarity" and "moral seriousness"?

And then I remember.  

There is a Club...

Burn The Lifeboats