NYT “conservative” David Brooks suffers rare moment of self-reflection

The unrelenting popularity of President Trump, even after three sham indictments from the corrupt Biden regime, has a one very prominent writer at The New York Times rethinking things. David Brooks is now pondering if progressives really are the “good guys” after all.

Wait, you mean the political movement that’s grooming children, censoring Americans, and arresting political opponents “KGB-style,” might not be the heroes, after all?

Insert big ol’ eye roll here…

Revolver News, Aug. 3, 2023 

David Brooks, a NYT “conservative” (i.e., a liberal who has not completely lost his marbles yet), has suffered a rare moment of self-reflection in which he wonders if “progressives” i.e., “the educated class” like himself, are really “the good guys” after all.  Brooks is the “conservative” who described John McCain as a “great candidate” but demonstrated his usefulness to the Left when he found himself so drawn to the creases of Obama’s trousers in 2008 that he voted for Obama.  Some conservative!  More recently, however, the fact that the peasants in flyover country have refused to abandon Trump has driven Brooks to look, briefly, in the mirror.  Maybe the “less educated” peasants actually have reasons to feel they have been mistreated by Brooks’ “enlightened” class.  Could it be that the self-appointed geniuses are not so brilliant and beneficent after all?

            It is, however, interesting to note that what has driven Brooks to this elusive moment of self-reflection is not that the Democrat News-media Colluders (hereafter the DNC) “moderate” Joe Biden has presided over the rise of inflation to a 40-year high, the enormous death toll and humiliation of Biden’s careless disaster in Afghanistan, North Korea’s resuming its ballistic missiles tests that were suspended under Trump, the new China-Russia-Iran alliance that Biden has managed to engineer (congratulations Joe!), China’s repeated flagrant humiliations of the United States, Biden’s ballooning debt, his “woke” administrative state, the record number (853) of dead people, including many children, at the open southern border in 2022, the massive influx of deadly fentanyl and other drugs into the United States through the southern border, the anarchy (blatant crime, shoplifting, assaults, including unprovoked assaults on Asians, etc.) around the country, the downgrading of the US credit rating, over 700,000 Covid deaths under Biden despite the fact that Trump gave him several vaccines, the Biden administration’s authoritarian partnership with social media to censor Americans, the press secretary of “the most open and transparent administration ever” that refuses to answer questions and then insultingly claims that her refusal to answer was the answer, the series of shameful indictments of their chief political opponent in the run-up to the 2024 election because Biden cannot campaign himself, a vice-president who somehow got a J.D. in her parents’ University of California system but talks like a child and cackles hysterically, etc. It was none of that that drove Brooks to awaken from his slumbers and glimpse a possible reason the peasants might prefer Trump to the “educated class’s” choice.

            Further, it was not that Trump left the country with inflation at 1.4%, or that he got North Korea, in opposition to all the hysteria by the genius class over his methods (“fire and fury”), to agree in principle to the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula, that Trump created the “Space Force” that was so obviously needed, that he created the Covid vaccine faster than all the geniuses, including Fauci, said was possible, that for the first time in a quarter century he got several Arab nations to sign the “Abraham Accords” to normalize relations with Israel, that according to former Border Chief Thomas Homan, Trump, without any help from congress, got illegal border crossings down to the lowest number ever, etc.  No, it was none of that that drove Brooks to take a brief humbling look in the mirror. 

            Part of the reason Brooks cannot, apparently, see the obvious is that he early came to see Trump as the “bigot in chief” and a “moral pygmy” because of Trump’s attack on the Khizir Kahn, the American Muslim whose son was killed during the Iraq war. After Khizir, waving around a copy of the US constitution, vehemently attacked Trump at the Democrat National Convention in 2016 over Trump’s call for a “Muslim ban”, Trump responded that the reason Mrs. Kahn did not speak is because of the subservience of Muslim women, widely seen as a cheap shot against a woman whose son died defending the United States.  

Many of us agree that even though Kahn attacked Trump first, and that there were unfair aspects to Kahn’s attack, Trump should not have attacked Mrs. Kahn.   Similarly, many of us don’t like Trump’s personal attacks on Ted Cruz’s wife, certain judges and others.  The fact that Trump is a “counterpuncher” responding to previous attacks, sometimes unfair, on himself is not sufficient justification for such uncouth behavior. 

What is puzzling, however, is the criterion by which our effete elitist over-lords hand out the “moral pygmy” and “bigot” awards.  Many of us think the real “moral pygmies” are those who purchases fake Russian dossiers to smear their political opponent, thereby cheating the American people out of a fair election, those who preside over a record number of dead people at the southern border even as they lie that the border is secure, those who carelessly withdraw from Afghanistan leading to our military people killed and many more seriously injured (not to mention the Afghans killed and injured) and then lie that the withdrawal was “an extraordinary success”, those who carelessly enact inflationary policies that disproportionately hit the poor they pretend to care about so much, or those who partner with social media to censor law-abiding Americans to help their political party, those who enact these fraudulent “Inflation Reduction Acts,” etc.  Why aren’t they the real moral pygmies?

Similarly, some of us wonder why Trump gets designated as a bigot when Biden’s silly comparison of Trump to Joseph Goebbels, or James Clyburn’s or Hank Johnson’s comparison of Trump’s rise to Hitlers rise, or the standard silly Democrat comparisons of Republicans to fascists, or the bigoted attacks on the police that were followed by actual assassinations of police officers , etc., do not get called out as bigoted?  The answer would appear to be that they have a “D” behind their name. Why, when Democrat rhetoric is regularly hateful, not to mention infantile, do only Republicans get labelled as bigots?

It would appear that Brooks, the son of academics who makes his lucrative living by saying the “right” thing on his favorite left-leaning TV shows, for example, surrendering, with his gullible compatriots Capehart and Woodruff on PBS,  to the dishonest “liberal” script about Trump, has a paradigm, in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, according to which saying the “right” thing, sounding a certain way, conveying the feigned compassion of the “more educated” classes, in brief, virtue-signaling (a species of self-glorification), is more important than the piles of dead people Biden has produced at the southern border, in Afghanistan, or in Americas cities.   Who really cares what happens to the “less educated” peasants!   There are too many of them already.  What’s important is only how one’s audience in the faculty lounges and “news” rooms receive one’s cultivated sneers and witticisms.  

[H]e is a hero only of words [and] avoids every occasion on which it is necessary to move from words to grim earnest.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

Agree/Disagree with the author(s)? Let them know in the comments below and be heard by 10’s of thousands of CDN readers each day!