Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Useless and Vile Mr. Brooks
David Brooks is Exhibit A for what is wrong with establishment liberals. Every vestige of principled, lively intellectual productivity has been replaced by a herd-like subservience to class sensibilities. Every liberal achievement of value, from civil rights to environmental awareness, has mutated into entities that are perverse, anti-human, Luddite and cultlike. Equal rights for women, for example, somehow morphed into mandatory acceptance of a broad range of sexual dysfunctions. But the professional liberal commentariat cannot bring itself to fight the destruction of their ideological and political legacy.
They cannot decry the malignant clown show that urban Democratic rule has become because those mayors are black and have the party imprimatur. The class did not use the actual data and science of COVID because they liked the sciency vibe of masks and lockdowns, and especially liked the idea of the rubes taking orders from the credentialed. Class sensibility über alles! The claim of adherence to The Science was class narcissism run rampant.
MAGA is the ultimate villain for the class in part because of Trumpian rhetorical stylistics, but mostly because MAGA is about saying that which the ruling class cannot say but knows to be true. DEI and wokeness are cultural and institutional disasters. The overt corruption in massive federal spending, the cynical attempt to reconfigure electoral politics with a hideously costly wave of illegals, the suicidal toleration of violence, street crime and insane policies on “unhoused” persons, and boys claiming trophies in girls’ sports are all immune from intelligent criticism by the elite class even as they privately disagree.
A truly malignant instance of how far Brooks has declined as a pundit and an honest broker of ideas can be found in this PBS interview last Friday. It will enrage you:
PBS News Hour
5/30/2025
7:38 PM ET
AMNA NAWAZ: David, how do you look at it? What’s his legacy, if we know that yet?
DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, I’m not sure it was wreckage. There was wreckage if you’re at NIH. There are wreckage at certain agencies, but the guy only saved $65 billion out of a multitrillion-dollar budget.
So, as a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven’t gotten over. And so there’s folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That’s true.
But according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That’s just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that’s 300,000 dead, and we’re four months in.
Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don’t have anybody on the list from America. And I don’t think it’s the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably, by the end of this, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that’s Elon Musk’s legacy.
Aside from the dubious statistics from groups likely affected by Trumpian cuts (Trump preserved full funding for all AIDS meds in the Big Beautiful Bill), the image of thousands suddenly dropping dead instantly because of cuts—many of which had not yet taken effect—is almost as sciencey as elite COVID policy preferences.
Comparisons to Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao are beyond over the top. That was pathetic and sick.
A good question for the indignant Mr. Brooks might be how much food and medicine could have been purchased with all the USAID money (perhaps more than half) that never made it past the beltway as the frenzy of complex, interlaced non-profits shared in on the grift? The agency was not merely “badly managed” but verged on being a criminal conspiracy. How many AIDS victims could have received drugs with the money spent on LGBTQ coloring books and the vast array of other woke indoctrination projects?
But it is typical of his class that Mr. Brooks is entirely incapable of acknowledging how extraordinarily out of control federal spending is or that a federal agency could depart so far from its mission as to be not worth saving. Nor can he condemn the grifter class (probably a significant share of the remaining Washington Post and New York Times subscribers). Much like Senator Schumer’s condemnation of the “meat ax” approach, he does not offer a constructive alternative to the work of DOGE while pretending to care about efficiency and accountability.
Brooks’ class sensibilities prevent serious discussion as to whether there is an inherent threat from Islamic doctrines and identity, the woke destruction of our universities, the extent to which “victim” doctrines are wrecking cities, insane energy policies, and the not-so-long-term fiscal and economic threat from excessive government spending. The fact that that these and so many other important issues are denied vigorous treatment in the elite op-ed world in general, but Brooks does have time to compare Elon Musk to Stalin, is a strong indication that he is increasingly useless as a participant (much less a leader) of broad conversations about important things that matter. And if, as appears to be the case with the NYT, that originality and depth are not required, an AI can easily echo class sensibilities in 750-word chunks. Cheaper and less annoying than observing decline and decay.
Published in General
Bravo. He knows the claims about people dropping dead everywhere due to recently or not-yet-enacted cuts are blatant lies, just as Elizabeth Warren speaking a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration about the prices of eggs not dropping yet knew that was a blatant lie. But they both know they could say such things and get a sympathetic nod from the interviewer, who also knew they were lies.
Honestly, I think the saving grace of this country is that so many people don’t pay attention to politics that don’t matter. They vote based on how their lives are actually going, not what is being fed to them by the credentialed class. And then they go back to their lives until the next election. That means that the David Brooks of the world and all his equivalents right and left don’t reach very many.
The “study” David Brooks is relying on is a model. Specifically, it has been termed a “speculative model” by its creator, Brooke Nichols of Boston University. All models are in some degree speculative. Calling out this model as speculative suggests to me that it is “guessier” than most. It is presented as what could happen as a result of the USAID cuts. There are no 300,000 dead people. The people putting credence in that number are boneheads. That includes Brooks, and Paul David Hewson, who styles himself “Bono.”
Bono gets a pass. Nobody expects a singer to know much. But Brooks really should have done a modicum of research. Some “facts” are too good to check, I guess.
These despicable baseless accusations are the Democratic Party’s stock in trade. The paragraphs that follow are from the Preamble to the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform:
People who make such assertions are worse than useless when they hold visible positions in media. People then believe those claims and then go on to support and to advocate for policies that are genuinely harmful.
Yet another demonstration, IMHO, of the likely inadvisability of annexing Canada as the 51st state (see also: David Frum). To my mind, the incomparable Mark Steyn stands–because there must be one–as just about the only exception that proves the rule.
I’m glad you called Brooks a liberal, which he is. Too many still refer to him as a conservative, which he has claimed to be since the 1990’s. In fact, he was the “conservative” on the PBS News Hour program for
yearsdecades paired off with an actual liberal like Mark Shields (and others) and the two hardly ever disagreed over anything of substance. He’s gained fame, influence and wealth off of his “conservative” grift. He’s a fraud now and has pretty much always been one from day one.David Brooks reminds me of “Smithers” from “the Simpsons”
Remember the Covid-19 models in the UK which drastically overrated the threat of the virus (experts)
Computer models are subject to GIGO
The model whose output most closely mirrors the result I want must be true. #science
Brooks is a Leftist now. Those cocktail parties must be amazing to turn so many “conservatives” into Leftists. It is almost as if those DC “conservatives” are really unprincipled grifters.
The Right needs to message carefully. They should say any negative impacts to the USAID fixes are because Democrats had so thoroughly corrupted. If Africans die, it is because the wicked Dems corrupted the aid programs for personal gain.
This is when I stopped regarding David Brooks seriously. 2009, speaking of Barry Soetero:
“I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”
What a complete clown. His career should have ended, but there is always room for another ostensible conservative who is really a large L liberal.
Great title. Brooksie really is a sociopath, altho not in the same league as the talented Mr. Ripley.
Cutting $1 from DEI spending means that we won’t cure cancer. It’s that simple.
NGOs are the ultimate scam with public money. They have updated the Depression era mantra justifying federal debt (We owe it to ourselves!) with a vastly more lucrative mantra that encourages unlimited federal spending: We pay it to ourselves!!
All grants to NGOs should be terminated and such grants should be outlawed by a constitutional amendment banning them.
In a more hopeful moment I might view these as examples of things that are waking people up to the mendacity of the media. But then I see articles about the distribution of self reported mental health problems among liberals. Enter the search phrase “Liberal voters have more mental health issues” and get ready for numerous articles explaining the results of Pew research surveys that found self-identifying liberals significantly more likely to be also claiming to have a mental disorders than conservatives. And the difference between liberal men and conservative men was even higher; though liberal men were doing better than liberal women. I don’t take these results without a grain of salt but they are consistent with my observations. Any guess who was least likely to report mental health issues? Conservative married men. Big surprise. (/sarcasm off).
This is not something to gloat about. These folks have a hole in their lives that politics cannot fill….
Great commentary OBath and FST!
Clearly, conservative men lack the self awareness to detect mental illness in themselves (certainly not in others) and seek treatment. Except me, of course. And most Ricochetti. (I’ll save the exceptions for a future post as soon as I have my affairs in order.)
U2 Bono<Sonny Bono
That’s gonna leave a mark.
It’s strange to describe Brooks—whose previous employers include National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the WSJ—as a liberal, establishment or not. He is a conservative of the moderate, non-foaming-at-the-mouth kind, as far as you can get from MAGA and Trumpism—transient, contemporary pestilences which have nothing in common with conservatism and which oppose many of its fundamental tenets like free trade, limited government, fiscal rectitude, individual liberty, respect for the law, high moral standards, etc.
So in reading over that: “according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected” here are my thoughts.
As far as HIV and AIDS, there is about to be an uptick in positive cases of those conditions that will descend on those people who seek necessary medical care.
Since RFK Jr is demanding that it no longer be possible for our health professionals to insist that healthy pregnant women, and healthy infants and children get jabbed with the risky mRNA vaxxes for COVID, so the solution is to make sure that all healthy pregnant women seeking medical care must undergo a PCR test for HIV. If it is then a “positive” test, that woman is no longer healthy, but is diseased, right? (Never mind that the testing method is flawed.) So now she is supposed to submit to the mRNA injection. If the shot kills or injures her, I imagine the death or injury will be attributed to the HIV affliction, which she might not even have had.
This matter came to light over the past few days when a couple in Massachusetts refused part or all of the various components of the “Well Baby” clinic procedures for their newborn. They had done enough research to realize that the baby did not need to have its eyelids swabbed with stuff to prevent its supposed chlamydia infection. They also did not want the Vit K stuff. They declined the hep b vaccine as well.
In other words they wanted their infant to be under the same standard of care that all of us baby boomers were assured of when we were babies. So since our group proved to be healthy, especially when compared to generations which arrived after us, it seems like they made the right choice.
However that did not prevent the CPS people from coming in and not only taking away the infant but the couple’s other children as well.
Other reasons to worry about the immediate future:
The main two things that those who brought about the COVID protocols have learned are that–
Number One: no one will go to prison for doing as they did. (Which resulted in at least 500K being killed in hospitals due to horrendous life-denying protocols.)
and
Number Two: there is nothing to stop them from continuing to employ protocols that drive up the numbers of whatever disease they have in mind so that they can also continue to drive up pharmaceutical firms’ profits and use new fake statistics to drive home the idea that we are now in worse shape than ever. According to the American Mengeles who continue to decide these things, they will be telling us that we are going to either die of the new COVID variant, or of the coming Marburg illness, or its vaccine, as well as possibly dying from this explosion in HIV “positive” cases.
So timely, published only last month in Commentary: In Praise of Big Pharma.
“Conservatives” like Brooks are akin to the Mensheviks and are doomed to the same fate as the Old Bolsheviks. The left won’t continue to keep them around once their usefulness has expired.
You need to elaborate on this.
Or not.
If he doesn’t explain what he means, I don’t buy it.
Wow! This is how to hit a home run with an opening paragraph . . .
Nobody says “not doubling DEI spending means we won’t cure cancer”. It is a stupid game and the GOP is bad at messaging. The Left is good at coordinating their message and repeating it, because repetition is the key to propaganda/advertising/messaging.
these are the people who support abortion – how many deaths were caused by this policy since Roe v Wade