RIP The Atlantic.
They just hired an Epstein Files guy, which tells you The Atlantic isn’t in the journalism business anymore.
It’s in the billionaire reassurance business.
Apparently they pulled David Brooks in as the best in the industry at telling intellectual elites that mounting catastrophes aren’t their problem. No, he spins tall tales about the liberals being at fault for refusing to empathize with the needs of fascism. It’s a teenage girl’s fault if she refused to “massage” Epstein and his clients. It’s Ukraine’s fault they refused to give away their land to Putin.
An exposé of this awful man by The Nation is the best thing I’ve read in weeks.
The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for The Atlantic: The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.
Apparently Brooks’ brand rose from Weekly Standard (neocon war propaganda) to New York Times (elite consensus maintenance) to The Atlantic (people who think they’re too smart for the Times). All of it has produced little more than intellectual cover for the consolidation of power, while pretending to be a critic.
Brooks’s entire game is the false alibi: look what the victim made the abuser do.
Liberals bring fascism upon themselves by being smug. Ukraine made their own invasion happen by not accommodating Putin. And when the Epstein files dropped? Brooks dismissed them as conspiracy bait for MAGA while being in those files himself. His defense when exposed was essentially: “Some of my best friends are billionaires I can’t keep track of which ones are known sex traffickers.”
That’s the architecture. Total elite impunity, fraudulently painted as reasonable centrism. How dare the children being sex trafficked accuse Epstein of exactly what Epstein was doing?! Brooks being a journalist while saying he can’t keep track of who around him does what crimes, is peak asshat hypocrite.
He punches down, way down.
He wants us to believe he can track anything, because that lets him blame downward. Yet anything that comes up to implicate billionaires? Suddenly this journalist can’t be expected to know the most obvious things. The thing about Epstein is that he operated with impunity as if above the law, not that he wasn’t known for sex trafficking children.
You can read Brooks and come away thinking the problem is teenage girls having confidence, not that institutions you trust are systematically captured by predators who face no accountability.