This Fucking Guy: David Brooks

Srsly, the Grey Lady really needs to do some load balancing but given their fawning over Trump and the emergent MAGApocalypse, they are too far gone. Turd polisher David Brooks is in the limelight

The words “Conservative Columnist for the Times” should make you cringe. But there is one of these who LARPs as a “moderate” or “Centrist”. I am speaking of his nibs, David Brooks.

He dribbles fecal matter out of his maw a couple times a week, wherein he attempts to play the “sensible” voice. But his inner twat-waffle inevitably comes out, and you are left with his equivocating, quivering goo.

What hit me this week (actually it is from Friday June 6) was his piece titled: “The Sins of the Educated Class”.

As he often does, he tries to lay out his early years where he was a “leftie”, to prime the pump for the conservative twaddle that he is about to spew:

When I was young, I was a man on the left. In the early 1980s, I used to go to the library and read early-20th-century issues of left-wing magazines like The Masses and The New Republic. I was energized by stories of workers fighting for their rights against the elites — at Haymarket, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, on the railways where the Pullman sleeping car porters struggled for decent wages a few years after that. My heroes were all on the left: John Reed, Clifford Odets, Frances Perkins and Hubert Humphrey.

But I got out of college and realized we didn’t live in the industrial age; we live in the information age. The center of progressive energy moved from the working class to the universities, and not just any universities, but the elite universities.

Gee, when you were ensconced in your ivory tower you seemed to care about progressive tropes, like labor being at the table and having a say in their fate.

But then you got out of college, and actually had to make a living, so you shucked off the shackles of progressivism, put on your Brooks Brothers knock-off suit, and began writing for the Man.

Cool bro.

But you lament that the epicenter of progressivism moved from public schools (in the 1960’s it was basically free for California state residents to attend either the state schools, or the University of California. Until Governor Reagan fucked that up, and put the schools on a downward path, but that is a topic for another day) to the “elite” institutions (read: Harvard, Yale, Penn, all the ivies…) and that fucked up those schools mission of turning out polished turds of past grads (legacy admissions) or Scions of the rich (think Trump) whose parental money greased the skids for their sub-par offspring.

And now that it costs almost as much to go to UC Berkeley, as is does Stanford, and is about as hard to get accepted as to go to Harvard, these young progressive Gen-Z kids are taking up valuable classroom space that could be better used for the wayward crotch goblins of the Industrial and Business Tycoon classes, who really want the sheepskin from an elite uni on the wall, AND access to the alumni network. Because you know that the cream of the Business leaders don’t come by that with intelligence, hard work, and discipline, fuck that, they want to jump to the head of the class.

C.F. The admissions scandals for the well-connected (and wealthy)

Naturally, he is going to the place were the student protests about the Gaza / Israel war. How come so many students at these elite schools are passionate? Is it because they aren’t working class, who are there to get job skills and to become cubicle dwellers, tapped to maximize shareholder (and CEO) value?

Today, we’re used to the fact that students at elite universities have different interests and concerns from students at less privileged places. Marc Novicoff and Robert Kelchen in May published an investigative report in The Washington Monthly titled “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” They surveyed 1,421 public and private colleges and concluded, “The answer is a resounding yes.”

Gee, kids who have had Tiger moms, mentors for the SAT’s, tutors to prepare them for the rigors, and who have carefully crafted their CV to have enough of the “right” activities to get the acceptance letter, are a little more progressive than first generation applicants whose parents may have worked 4 jobs to get them the opportunity to go to college?

A few schools with a large number of lower-income students, they found, had Gaza protests, “but in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity.” Among private schools, encampments and protests “have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuitions and fees are exorbitantly high.”

Gee, could it be that these ELITE institutions, that have endowments measured in tens of billions of dollars, yet charge 0.01% level fees for a year of education really aren’t trying to infuse their student body with the “riff raff” unless they need students who have to work in the cafeteria to help pay their way. But lord help us if there are more than a sliver of them. You would want Buffy to have to interact with the poors, heaven to Betsy!

Of course, Brooks thinks that his experience of matriculating from an ELITE institution is wistful:

I went to an elite university and have taught at them. I find them wonderful in most ways and deeply screwed up in a few ways. But over the decades and especially recently, I’ve found the elite, educated-class progressivism a lot less attractive than the working-class progressivism of Frances Perkins that I read about when I was young. Like a lot of people, I’ve looked on with a kind of dismay as elite university dynamics have spread across national life and politics, making America worse in all sorts of ways. Let me try to be more specific about these dynamics.

These meddling kids are fucking up my narrative, whaa whaa,.

He later posits some bullshit:

Imagine you graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college with a degree in history and you get a job as a teacher at an elite Manhattan private school. You’re a sincere progressive down to your bones. Unfortunately, your job is to take the children of rich financiers and polish them up so they can get into Stanford. In other words, your literal job is to reinforce privilege.

This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalized, but you work at Horace Mann or Princeton, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You’re bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man.

So, let’s get this straight. Your parents either had mega cash to get you in with few encumbrances, or you had enough help, mentoring, and a plan to position yourself to get the golden ticket, and then you feel compelled to conform to the narrative that you need to show compassion for the others, the downtrodden.

You know, there was a time when the robber barons had consciences, and lived out their later years buying things to help ameliorate the suffering of those on the bottom rungs of the system. Andrew Carnegie built tons of libraries to atone for his fucked up treatment of workers who tried to organize. Rockefeller funded many cultural activities.

But now, it is “I got mine, fuck you” as they pull the ladder up.

And Mr. Brooks is given an aerie where he is perched to say “gee, we need more commoners to go to the elite institutions, so that the “woke mobs” will be tempered.” He and his ilk joust against Political Correctness, Affirmative Action, and “wokeness” even though they struggle to define these things.

I mean, why can’t we go back to the 1960’s where women couldn’t get credit cards, or the 50’s where you would literally shut down public pools to prevent your white offspring from having to share the water with “those people”. And for fuck’s sake, you can’t even tell a joke with the N-word without someone tattling

Fuck that turd.

My last word on this. When it was the in thing to do to bitch about inflation, David Brooks posted this gem:

Gee, that DOES sound like a lot, but in this internet era, someone who actually works at that airport restaurant had to set the record straight:

“This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible,” Brooks wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, alongside a photo of a burger, fries, and a honey-colored liquid on the rocks. 

The owner of 1911 Smoke House BBQ, the in-airport restaurant where Brooks bought the costly dinner, said the journalist would have had to have downed two doubles to rack up the hefty bill.

The burger was $12, the bar tab was $66, two doubles of top shelf Bourbon will do that, and of fucking course, he was able to expense this, so it really wasn’t an imposition on his wallet.

All told, David Brooks is a masterclass on how to be a conservative douche-nozzle, while pretending to be for the little guy.

For that, he is well deserving of “That Fucking Guy” title.

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