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Don't click Seth, you know you don't want to click, it's going to be terrible, don't click [I clicked]... I TOLD YOU NOT TO CLICK!!!!
Deep historical insights garnered from David Brooks from his time immersed in the subculture of punk rock (er, I mean, from listening to one podcast): a couple overzealous liberal kids concerned about sexual harassment are going to do a genocide like Rwanda.
And if David Brooks actually took 2 seconds to learn something about the things he writes about, he'd learn that progressives have been critiquing "call out culture" for years now...from the left. Can we now talk about a certain, cruel MAGA cult currently RUNNING THE COUNTRY?
Like, I'm a little bit more concerned with the President calling the entire media industry out as being "fake news," you know, like authoritarians who command armies do.
Or maybe we might be concerned with large segments of the conservative media being obsessed with @aoc and trying desperately to "call her out" for something so as to squash her public voice and her ideas.
Or maybe we could talk about the profitable right wing industry known as the "intellectual dark web" where grifters monetize the anxieties & animosities of alienated (largely white male) young people to call out feminists, anti-racists, & gender non-conforming people as subhuman?
But yeah, that punk rock subculture where some people were nasty to each other (because, you know, people have never acted like that before in human history), now those are the folks we need to keep an eagle eye on if we want to avoid a genocide. SMDH.
How many completely predictable and politically tendentious "get off my lawn you damn kids" columns does David Brooks have to write about subjects he knows nothing about before the NYTimes finally gives his op-ed position to someone who understands American culture?
The "I grew up in the liberal world and then became a conservative because man, let me tell you those liberals are cuckoo" schtick has gotten incredibly old. Why not have a voice on that page of someone who actually grew up in a poor, conservative community?
Ok, just a final observation here. I think Brooks rightly links "call out culture" to "cycles of abuse." You know who taught us about "cycles of abuse" more than anyone else? Feminists. Like the sorts of feminists that Brooks's brand of conservatism defines itself against.
Sorry, one more thing. Remember back when David Brooks wrote that piece claiming that capicola was ruining America? I'm not going to link to it, you can google it. Anyway, you know who serves capicola these days? That bastion of elitist liberalism, Panera. panerabread.com/en-us/recipes/…
And BTW, I grew up in a working-class small town with lots of working class people who knew about capicola. Because they were f*cking Italian and that's what working class Italian-Americans have eaten for centuries...Mr. "I'm in touch with the common people" Brooks.
Here's why conservatives like Brooks bug me so much. He collectivizes the criticizable actions of relatively disempowered liberals, and individualizes the criticizable actions of relatively empowered people. Let me explain.
Jordan P*terson or Charles Murray or some other conservative with a huge platform says something many people perceive as racist...Brooks and his ilk are all like "OMG, freedom of speech is under assault. They are just individuals saying what they think, they must be protected!"
Some young person with an instagram account calls out someone they know for sexual harassment, and Brooks is like "OMG, the genocide is coming! Head to the hills all you good people!"
Much of conservative thought has taken this form...when young people or women or people of color say something we don't agree with it's an existential threat to western civilization and must be stopped, but when someone in power says something outre it's "freedom of speech" hour.
