Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 840: I Should Have Seen This Coming - David Brooks

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

  Discussion of this article.

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glorial Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way, we bring critical thinking, skepticism and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad.

It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome bad. Today is Long Form Day, Cecil, yay, Long Form Day. It's political and there is no welcome at today is long form day. Cecil. Yay. Long form day. And we're going to be talking about an article from the Atlantic written by David Brooks called I should have seen this coming.

Can I start this out with a tone? I just want to tone start, start this out with a little bit of tone setting. Fuck this guy in the fucking face forever. Never stop fucking this guy. Like, this guy is the worst. I fucking, I was listening to this and I ground my teeth down to fucking nubs. Oh my God.

This is like the only article in America that's ever been written while the leopard was eating the face at the same time. It's amazing to sit at a keyboard with a fucking leopard attached to your fucking skin and fucking clack away at the goddamn keyboard and still manage to sound more than a little fucking sanctimonious about it. I know, right? Sound pretensions to be pretensions be like well actually it's a panther it's a spotted panther that's on my face it's not actually a leprosy. Fuck this guy. Dude I fucking hated this article with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. I listened to this article so they normally see so I don't I don't do the like listen thing you know I like to read it's just kind of how my brain works a little bit better.

So I'm a reader. I was kind of pressed for time. I was trying to kill two birds with one stone. So I was like, oh, I'll work out. I usually work out and listen to a podcast. I'll work out, I'll listen to this. I listened to it and I'm like, I feel like I missed something.

That article was fucking stupid. It was stupid. I must have not paid attention. So then later in my day, I had to go run some errands. I put it on in the car, I put put on my headphones as I was running errands I listened more carefully and I'm like, no, I didn't miss anything. This article is a sanctimonious pile of fucking regret drivel it's Horrible and it's it also is an article that says although he says in here

I should have seen this coming what he really wrote an article was I should have seen this coming. What he really wrote an article was, you should have seen this coming. Yeah, you should have seen this coming because you made this. Yeah. You caused this. He takes no responsibility at all. Yep.

He takes, like, I fucking hate this. I should have seen this coming. Okay, cool, man. Maybe you're gonna take some accountability for how your adherence to right-wing ideas and ideologies, which from the 1980s forward have set the stage for the possibility of the very thing that you're now lamenting. Maybe all of that power creep that you fucking celebrated as it happened, maybe all of the

fucking lies and dirty tricks and fucking procedural bullshit that you guys have all celebrated and jerked fucking Mitch McConnell's fucking dead, fucking turned off, fucking dick into your hands on like maybe all of that shit that you know, none of that, no, no self-awareness whatsoever in this article. None. This is instead a fucking finger waggy history lesson about how, you know, it used to be that the conservatives were really this party of gentle, loving, compassionate Americans. Delicious.

Definitely, definitely delicious to Leopard's Americans. That's what they were. They were basted. They had butter basted faces, and the leopards just ate their faces out of nowhere. There they were. What were they wearing for the leopards to eat their face like that?

A meat suit? What was I wearing? One thing I will say, let's start out the beginning. So at the beginning of the article, he talks about sort of his history and the history of where he comes from. And he said that there was sort of like a conservative movement from where he went to college. He went to college at this place.

And in that same college, there was his group of people and then what he called the reactionaries. He said there was a group of people who he called the reactionaries who he thought were never gonna get anywhere These people were they were all they wanted to do was hurt other people. They all they wanted to do was have this power They didn't care about anybody they he figured This group's gonna Peter itself out. It's gonna blow itself out. It's not gonna be around But then within seconds and I will say this it's not gonna be around. But then within seconds, and I will say this, this is news to me.

I didn't know that there's been this sort of what we call trolling for politics, right? Which was what we've been talking about for the past several years. This where like politics has spawned this, what we thought was like a trolling movement. According to him, that sort of thing's been around for a while.

He's been involved in politics since the 80s, and he's saying these reactionaries existed back then. Now, I can't say that I've been that deep in politics for so long that I knew that that was the case. I didn't know. I mean, I'll admit when I don't know something, and this is something I did not know. I did not know that we could look out over the vast distance

of the Republican party, the vast timeline of the Republican party and find these little pockets of trolls throughout. I didn't realize that was a thing, but he seems to claim that was true. So that to me is something of a revelation. He goes on to blame the like people on the left for why they eventually came into power.

We'll get to it. But what did you think of that in particular? That the reactionary thing? Was that something you realized? I guess like it called attention to me to, I immediately thought of Cecil when you and I first started podcasting, when we were doing, everyone's a critic,

but we would talk about politics stuff. And I remember the tea party, opposing Obama, and showing up with their racist images and their racist caricatures, and their, you know, monkey signs and all the rest of that horrible shit. And I think that's just pre-internet trolling. I think that that's what that was. Sure. And I think that there were definitely people who were on the right who did not agree with that

sort of like aggressive, overtly racist, they wanted to be more covertly, overtly racist, you know, I think there were people who were like, hey, you know, like we wanna talk about tax policy and foreign policy, and you know, we have differences of opinion and all that stuff. And then I think that in my mind, it was the Tea Party. I didn't realize that this was still,

like this was the case in the 80s and 90s. But I guess in my mind, it was the Tea Party. Well, now that I think about it, I mean Rush Limbaugh, of course, right? Yeah, right. Newt Gingrich, you know, those are two names that I think about it, I mean, Rush Limbaugh, of course, right? Yeah, right. Newt Gingrich, you know, those, those are two names that pop into my head that are like, yeah, would, would you consider them reactionaries?

Would you consider those people, the people who were trolling, who were going out of their way to troll other people and to, to, to belittle other people and to, you know, basically tell lies and try to manipulate everything they can to get as much power as possible. Those two names come to mind. I'm sure the thing is, is like, that's sort of like the beginning of my political sort of understanding was right around that time. You know, so, so that's as far back as I go. And so part of, part of me recognizing that this is, you know, that there's this, this

goes back farther than I thought is I just wasn't politically aware. I'm sure if I go back to the eighties and the seventies and the sixties and the fifties, there's somebody there that is fitting this bill that he's suggesting. And it seems sort of very uniquely positioned to be a right winger.

It feels like the way he's talking about it. It feels like it's very uniquely positioned to be someone who is on the far right. But what he says is, not that these people would peter out. He's like, they would have petered out if you left people, people on the left didn't antagonize them and try to take over all our universities and throw people out of there and bring your,

and essentially what he's saying is bring your woke bullshit and no one wants to Hear it and now you made everybody mad and now you have to deal with it. That's exactly like this is so fucking weirdly blamey that like the anger and the vitriol and the hate and The cruelty all of which he lays out all of which he acknowledges the the complete dismantling of social norms the dismantling of Dismantling of our political infrastructure Lying as a tool of state all of this stuff. He fucking acknowledges and then yeah, he's sort of is like, yeah But I mean, what did you expect us to do or become? If you guys wanted, you know black people at schools or whatever is fucking,

you know, like whatever, cause there's no actual meat. I hate about this shit Cecil, and it's important to point out for people is like, there's never any meat on the bone when they point out what they're so mad about on the left, right? They're gonna say, oh, like you're woke shit or your DEI stuff. Like, okay, well, let's be specific. What is it with specificity that you don't like? And the more you try to get into specifics, the less people are able to have that conversation. Because they don't know. They don't know what they have as a fucking feeling in their gut.

And the feeling in their gut that they're reacting to isn't my fucking fault. Because I'm over here doing specific shit, man. And like if that makes you have a fucking weirdness in your belly or something, that's on you. Take a Zantac. Don't fucking like deport a brown guy. Like what the fuck is wrong with you? This is crazy.

It's so fucking blamey. And there's like a suggestion by him that this is a new problem, that this is a Trumpian problem. And it's like, I know I said it in the beginning, but like, this is not a problem that began eight or 10 years ago. All of the preconditions to make this kind of power creep possible, to make this kind of accumulation possible, to make, you can't have a Trump if you didn't support all the other shit, David Brooks. If you didn't fucking support George W. Bush, you couldn't have Donald fucking J. Trump.

One requires the other. One requires as a precondition, the work of the other. Yep. One requires as a precondition the work of the other. If you didn't have fucking Mitch McConnell, you couldn't have Donald Trump. 100%. They are 100% in fucking lockstep. But these assholes, these ahistorical piece of shit lying assholes, they pretend that Donald Trump is an aberration and they do that to avoid taking real moral responsibility for having built an entire house.

Exactly. That this relies on. I can't stand this shit. I read this and I was like, I fucking hate you, David Brooks. I hate you personally. I hate your wife for loving you. I hate your children for having been the fucking progeny of your loins. I fucking hate you. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was right there with you. I think like too here he's talking about it. When

he's talking about this reactionary versus sort of traditional conservative, tell me he wouldn't put Mitch McConnell in traditional conservative. Of course he would. Right. But look at how damaging someone like Mitch McConnell has been for say our justice system. Look at what he's done to manipulate and essentially gerrymander the Supreme Court. He gerrymandered the Supreme Court. He did what he could. He laughed about it. Yeah, and then he laughed about it. They said, oh, you're being hypergeneous. He's like, yeah, whatever.

You run that through the Supreme Court because I got six justices. What the fuck do you have? You know? I mean, he basically was like, that's what you sound like. And then he dropped his balls on the mic and then he walked away. Yeah. Well, he paused for a long time before he walked away. He was frozen for quite a long time sort of moving and then they finally dragged him away. But, you know, like, what would you, of course that's true. And then, you know, for him to blame, like you were saying, he's blaming it on, you know, woke stuff, but then he's also blaming it on higher education, how they purged, he's saying they purged conservatives. They're like, dude, are you kidding me? Purge conservatives?

What do you mean? Like, look at these places of higher education. Look at across this country at these, you know, these Ivy League institutions. Do you think they're producing leftists there? Do you think that Harvard is shit? Harvard law is shitting out leftist fucking, like, fucking defense attorneys

that are gonna go through, they're gonna go back to their hometown and like defend people for like, you know, scraps on the dollar or are they gonna go out and make a shit ton of money and be the America's next conservatives? The idea that you're, and who's teaching them there, right?

It's not like there's this big liberal cabal of Lawyers that are teaching people at Harvard law who the fuck the fuck are you thinking? What are you talking about and the idea that they've been purged? They've been purged like there was some sort of like like somehow the people who are you know on the left? They purged them out of the rolls They didn't do anything except for on occasion, some of these guys came out as Holocaust deniers and they said, it's really bad for business if you stick around. So that's what they got rid of some people that you might've thought were conservative,

but get the fuck out of here with your, oh, they had so much power and they wielded and they were the ones who were stifling free speech and you cause you Bastards cause this fuck this guy fuck him It wasn't like the fucking night of long knives that fucking you know brown or something like get the fuck out of here That's that shit is that shit is absolute liars nonsense, but I think even More important is what a fucking enormous red herring. Well, first I'm going to back up to your point to yes.

And your point more than half of the like big players in the fucking Trump administration right now went to fucking Harvard. Yeah. Like I was, I was, I don't remember the names. I was looking at a thing that was talking about this very subject. Just like yesterday, the day before an article, I don't remember, I was looking at a thing that was talking about this very subject just like yesterday or the day before, an article, I don't remember where it was, might have been the post, that specifically identified

like this guy, Harvard, this guy, Harvard, this guy, Harvard, this guy, Harvard, this girl, Harvard, this lady, Harvard, this lady, Harvard, and you're like, they all went to fucking Harvard, man. So like, they've got their fucking boner hate on for Harvard right now, they all fucking, that's their alma mater for half of these fucking people yeah but like they know the fight song for Christ's sake. Right I know man they left for all part of like fucking

skull and key or fucking whatever fucking George Bush was at Yale like they are such a tiny percentage of the whole they don't fucking matter they don't matter who cares what happens at the Ivy League? Be like, you're not going there. Less than 1% of all college students are in the Ivy League. That's not even, that's not important. You're not sending your kid to the fucking Ivy League. How do I know? Because only 1%. That's an easy thing for me to say. Or like, I'll be wrong 1% of the time, man. It's a real fucking easy thing to say. I will say depending on who you're talking to though, because if you're talking to somebody who's in the White House, the chances are a lot better because nepotism is fucking alive

and well. And let me tell you, all those people can fucking get their kid into Harvard. So absolutely it's, but you and I, chances are fucking there. Better chance they're going to win the lottery. Are you kidding me? I don't know. It's like everybody wants to fucking like get fucking so worked up about what's going on in the Ivy league, what's going on. What difference does that make to you? That makes no difference. We should be thinking about what's happening in the broader post-secondary

educational system as a whole where actual people and students and professors are going and working. That's what matters. Again, even that is a slice of a pie that isn't representative of the American whole, because most Americans don't go to college. So like, you take like this body, like America's worked up about this thing, which when you take the pie and you say, okay, most Americans don't go to college, slice. Of the people that go to college, a huge chunk don't finish.

Slice. Of the people that go to college, almost none of them attend an Ivy League school. Slice, slice, slice, slice, slice. Why do I give a shit? Why am I having a conversation about what's happening at an elite university? That's like me saying like, hey, let's have a conversation about athletics in America, but the only thing I'm going to pay attention to is the fucking, you know, US grand national tournament figure skaters.

Yeah. That's a tiny fraction of all the athletes. Right, right. I don't care. I don't care. It's not important. It's not representative of the whole. What it is is a red herring.

It's a distraction on purpose. It's trolling. it's rage bait. They want you to care about what happens at Columbia more than what happens at the University of Kentucky or at your local community college or at your trade school. Because like, that's where everybody you know goes, right? Everybody you know goes to one of those schools. Everybody you know graduated from one of those schools.

Again, just by the numbers, that's gonna be true. But if they get you worked up about what the fuck is going on at Brown or Yale or Harvard or Columbia or whatever, they're getting you worked up about something you can't control, can't do anything about, doesn't affect your life and isn't representative of America. It's a fucking distraction and that shit is always on purpose. Yeah. You know, when I was thinking about, because I had such a vitriolic reaction to this article when I was listening to it, I felt like, you know, I had said in the past when we were talking a couple of times, I've said, you know, we need to be more accepting, especially

people who think that they've, you know, maybe made a mistake or they wouldn't want to vote for this person again. They want to get off the train. They want to mistake or they wouldn't want to vote for this person again, they want to get off the train, they want to move on. They might have made a mistake a couple of times, but I want to try to welcome those people in any way that I can because we recognize that we need to get the votes as many votes as possible and we recognize that. And I still think that holds up

as long as you're not David Brooks. I feel like everybody else. And you know, like, and the reason why I say that is because the, your average person who's like, let's say that, you know, they're working two jobs, they're trying to, you know, make two, trying to figure out how to make two ends meet. And they just, they're like, man, I got to change something. Biden has, there's been a bunch of inflation under him. Maybe this next thing will help, whatever. Well, they do a flip.

They decide to flip the switch. Like we have seen some data to suggest that people, instead of doing anything that's, you know, not, it's not like they're doing something that's, you know, necessarily MAGA. They're just doing something that hopefully can change things for them for the better, right? So we've seen some data to show that maybe that might be how people reacted to this,

some people reacted in this last election. So we see that person and we think, oh, you know, that person, maybe we should, you know, some of us who have the ability and the thought process and aren't still mad about the election can maybe welcome that person and figure out a way to get that person back onto a regular, like a regular thought pattern, a pattern that doesn't revolve around lies and maga. But they're not writing a fucking think piece

in the Atlantic, right? They're not out there spreading conservative ideas for the last 40 years, right? These're not out there spreading conservative ideas for the last 40 years, right? These are people who are out there just voting. And I feel like, yeah, those people are different than David Brooks. David Brooks is out there literally, he's laundering these ideas to the American people constantly. And whether or not he agrees with Trump, I bet you he agrees with some of his ideas. And I bet you he laundered some of those ideas

to people who listened to him before he starts to have his big regrets. Yeah, man. The phrase that I had written down was intellectual laundering. And that's exactly what you just described. David Brooks describes himself as an intellectual. Right, that's his, I'm gonna read from the article.

Conservative intellectuals didn't take this seriously enough. In large part, I think this is because we look down on the Dartmouth Review mafia, whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza. Their intellectual standards were so obviously third rate. I don't know how to put this politely, but they just seemed creepily, creepy, nakedly ambitious in a way that I thought would destroy them in the end.

Like what he's suggesting here is like, hey, we were looking down our nose at all the populist types. And we missed the fact that the populists were tapping into something because we were so busy with our fucking nose up in the air that we didn't understand and recognize that we were their bitches.

We on the right in the fucking intellectual circles, you were their bitch. You were their bitch the whole time. But like my ability to feel sorry for somebody like David fucking Brooks, who was a bitch during the fucking W administration, right? Like he's been involved in this since the eighties and I look back and I'm like, okay,

but like George W. Bush was an appalling war criminal. He was a liar. He lied on purpose to force Americans to accept and support a war that he knew at the time, knew at the time, was being prosecuted illegally and on false pretenses and over a hundred thousand civilian human beings died as a result of that. And you laundered that. You laundered that. And he has the gall in this article to talk about the fucking moral high ground, to talk about things like, we thought we were doing good, you know, supporting these programs to combat AIDS in Africa and whatever.

It's like, fuck you forever. Fuck you forever. And I hope it hurts every time. I fucking hate this shit. You carried water for these people. You carried their water for fucking decades. I don't understand. I don't understand Cecil. I'm fucking I'm floored by the lack of self awareness that is involved here.

He also mentions to Tom, there's this part where he's talking about evangelicals. He's like, I have really good friends who are like evangelicals and they, you know, they went out of their way to like, they're trying to help people. They're trying to, you know, stop people from getting AIDS in Africa and they're out here, you know, they went out of their way to like, they're trying to help people. They're trying to, you know, stop people from getting AIDS in Africa. And they're out here, you know, making sure about this and that. And they're helping feed people and they do a lot of work in Washington, DC. And they can't, they don't like what they're seeing. And I'm like, motherfucker, even jungle is overwhelmingly voted for Trump.

What are you talking about? Like, like, look, man, I get it. I get you want to jump off the Trump train. And there's a part of me, don't get me wrong, there's a part of me that definitely wants you to pull a different ballot next time, okay? There's definitely a part of me, and all your evangelical friends too,

get them to pull a different ballot next time. But don't expect me to look at some of these people, especially these Washington types, these Washington evangelicals who have, you know, set up shop there that are influencing tons of politicians over time. Don't try to convince me that those people didn't know what the snake was when they picked it up. Like, are you fucking kidding me?

We know what Donald Trump was. We knew what he was before he even, like there's a fucking clip, again, we're covering this on the Joe Rogan experience, on the no Rogan experience, we're covering Donald Trump, there's a clip from him from 2011 on The View where he comes out and he's a birther, man, they're arguing with him cause he's a goddamn birther, he's a fucking racist, shitty asshole in 2011.

We knew Donald Trump. We knew everything about what he was. He walked down a fucking golden escalator and he said, there's fucking, they're shipping their rapists here. He didn't even acknowledge the idea that there was immigrants. He's like, they're shipping their rapists. What the fuck? And you voted for that? And you want me to be like, oh yeah, you know, you know you're right. Again, I'm saying this to the people who are in charge, fuck off.

You fucking have a little, have a little self respect and recognize you did something wrong. Thank you. And like, there's, there's, there's nothing about Trump that has surprised us. If you're surprised, it's because you were lying to you. Yeah. Not because Trump was lying to you.

If you're surprised, it's because you lied to you. He said something that hit your fucking lizard brain and it turned off all of your higher order reason skills. That's it. That's it. You liked it, right? It got you fucking hard. And now this is your fucking's it. You liked it, right? It got you fucking hard. And now this is your fucking post-nut clarity moment, right? And you're sitting there with

your fucking limp, stupid Republican dick in your hand. And you're wondering why you feel weird right now, smothered in your own fucking feces and lube or whatever got you off and you're like, this is not what I wanted. This is everything you wanted. You don't get to say that. We knew. Your point is exactly right. It wasn't like, oh man, until he got elected, we didn't know. We fucking knew. We knew. Well, the fucking inside edition tape came out. You saw exactly who that man was.

Yep. He made fun of a fucking, like, there's a hundred examples before he was elected. A hundred examples. He fucking took out that fucking huge spread in the New York Times about the Central Park Five calling for them to be executed. We knew this. That was in the fucking 90s, man. We knew who this guy was.

Here's a line from this fucking article from the Atlantic that makes me want to strangle this man. It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches. Oh, is that what it turns out? Oh, we didn't know it. Oh, oh, clutches my pearls. Let's me clutch them so hard.

Is that what turns out, David Brooks? Oh, we actually couldn't have, we couldn't have anticipated that it would be a bad thing if you mix narcissism and nihilism. And then, well, it turns out it's worse than both of them. Goodbye. Or any one of them separately. Like, fuck you.

God, this guy sucks so bad. How did you not know? You know, how did your fucking, your evangelical friends that are out there doing their mission work, how the fuck didn't they know that Trump wasn't going to basically enact project 2025? Everybody said he was. Everybody said he was. Everyone said it. Everyone. We knew he was going to do it. And then, how fucking dare you, fucking

Brooks. And within the first couple of sentences, he says the guy who was part of project 2025, who essentially wrote it, is now part of his administration. You're like, yeah, we fucking knew he was going to be there. We knew it. Like, he wrote a book that was his invitation. Like, he wrote a whole book. He had it curated with all these weirdos on the fucking far right.

These weird people who think the birth rate's going down, their fucking white genocide these weird people who think the birth rates going down there their fucking white Genocide group of people they're psychos. They want to destroy all government They want to make sure there's no there's no governmental support for people They want fucking forced birthing like read this fucking thing page through it before you fucking vote for somebody You know page have your have your evangelical friends page through this before you vote for somebody. You know, page have your, have your evangelical friends page through this before they decide to make a vote. Instead, we get to hear it afterwards, be like, man, what a terrible choice.

Well, man, the book was sitting on the table the whole time. Everybody knew what was going to happen. It's not like we didn't know. So here's my question to you that I have about this article. Why now? It's not like we didn't know. So here's my question to you that I have about this article. Why now? Why now? Because we're saying the same thing and we're saying it loudly and like everybody else was.

So why is it a hundred and fucking two days or whatever into the administration that now, why now do you think David Brooks? You know the answer to that. So tell me, what do you think it is now? It's here in his packet book. That's it. He's got, it's his stock portfolio.

He's fucking money's gone. He lost, like I'm seeing all these conservative guys fucking crying in their beer, I lost seven million dollars. And the thing is they lost, they had seven million dollars to lose, right? These are people who had seven million dollars to lose. So they're all crying in their beer, they're upset with them. Well, that's what this guy is. This guy's mad now. This is that post-nut clarity we're talking about. He's been covered in the feces and lube of Trump for the past like decade, right? Like this is a guy who's fucking swam with that. And

now here he is post-nut clarity. Fuck. What did I just do? What did I just fuck like? What did I just did I just fuck this couch like JD? He's waking up and he's got a cigarette and the couch has a cigarette So so here's a guy who doesn't know he He's like, well, I don't know. Now that I'm going to be poor, I don't know that I like any of this. Before, if you were going to be poor, I didn't give a fuck. Yep. Yep. That's fucking exactly it. Because I'll tell you what, here's how you know this to be true. Because he didn't write this article in 2017, 2018, 2019, or 2020. That's why it's how you know this is true. He didn't write this article until now.

But none of this is new shit. He didn't write it after January 6th, Tom. Yeah, but that's fucking, thank you. He didn't write it after Trump flew around with stolen documents in his plane. Yep, that's exactly it. He's writing here in this fucking high-minded fucking pros about, you know, beliefs and ideologies and, you know, uh, care for the working class.

And, you know, who's going to take care of the poorest of Americans. It's like the fucking Democrats. It's never been anybody but the Democrats. Never, ever, never, never, never. Not one time ever has it been the Republicans. Why in the world do you think you can write like this with any authority? Like, think of all the moments,

the horrifying, disgusting moments of the first Trump administration. If you try to think about all those moments, you'll miss 100. You'll forget 100 of them. I'm not even exaggerating. You will forget 100 hundred of them. I'm not even exaggerating. You will forget a hundred moments of appalling cruelty and stupidity. You'll miss a hundred.

And that's if you were paying attention and you have a good memory, you'll still miss a hundred. He didn't write this article during any of that. When Trump came out, he writes all this stupid fucking high-minded, you know, religious ideology bullshit about taking care of people. Where was all that when Trump took a Bible and held it up as a photo op after clearing protesters and violating their civil rights with fucking army helicopters? That doesn't violate any of these ideals or beliefs or norms or ideologies. That wasn't a grotesquery in your mind, David Brooks. Now all of a sudden, Oh, what a coinkydink your portfolios down and your typewriters out. This, this dude sucks.

He sucks. What do you think about his estimation of the sort of authoritarian wing of this right wing party, his thoughts on how it's going to sort of blow itself out like a bad fire because they're eventually going to overreach and they're going to blow themselves out like a bad, like a fire does, you know, like when a fire burns itself out, it doesn't have any more fuel. If they overreach, they're going to really cause some real problems because he does bring some uh, historical context to this and says that you know, there was another person like trump back in the day, uh,

Jackson, andrew jackson is who he can compare him to and he he says that jackson overreached and so He was like, you know that that that caused the real issue and they're like, oh he was like, you know, that, that, that caused the real issue. And they were like, oh, nope. Uh, you know, immediately he was sort of put on blast and that was it. After that, there wasn't any, his power sort of waned. And that's what he's thinking is going to happen with the Trump administration. Do you buy into that at all? No, he has no fucking idea what he's talking about.

None. Fuck them. Here's the thing. He's been a liar for fucking 50 years and all of a sudden now I'm supposed to be like, oh, this'll be the part of his 2,500 word essay that he was being intellectually honest. Fuck that.

No, I don't buy it. And I also don't buy it because he's pulling out examples that are 40, 50, 100 years old. We're living in a world where 20 years ago doesn't look meaningfully like 20 years now. The world moves at an exponentially faster rate and the conditions of our society change. I don't think it's meaningful anymore to look at something that happened in 1960 or 1970 in a country that wasn't even our country and say, well, here's how it played out there. It'll probably play out the

same way here. That shit strikes me as more intellectual laundering of the Republican party's continued viability after this. I think what a lot of these dickheads are doing is they are trying to say, all right, we are not the worthless sack of craven, feckless assholes that we have shown you for a fucking decade that we are. When, when this is all said and done, please gently blot the cum from our lips and let us back into your homes and into your hearts.

And I'm like, how about no, how about no, you don't know what you're talking about. There is no magic solution. There is no magic potion that guarantees the survival of democracy anywhere, including in the United States. You're absolutely right. A think piece like this that suggests otherwise minimizes that damage by saying that, that overcoming it is an inevitability. And I hate that.

Not only overcoming is inevitability, but he's almost trying to say, like, once you guys overcome it, you're going to be like one of those bowls that the Japanese make with the fucking gold in it. The Kintsugi bowls. Yeah. Like, yeah, I'm going to make one of these bowls. So like, if you're unfamiliar with the concept, it's like a broken bowl and they, they meld, they mold it back together with gold.

So it looks different, but it looks like it's sort of, it's, it's supposed to be stronger than it was before. And it's like, it's like a symbol of, yeah, it's symbolic. Bullshit, right? First off, what Tom said is correct. We have no idea if you fucking hit the hard reset button, if this whole thing is gonna start back up again.

We don't know, you have no idea. So let's pretend we don't know. But also, you know, if you got to rebuild something, what happened to it in the first place? Right. Like we're all like, well, you know, you can rebuild it. I'd be like, OK, David Brooks. Well, what happened to the thing that was already there? Yeah. Right. What happened to that? And do you have any part in what happened to that?

Do you hold any responsibility for the fucking smoking rubble of democracy that you left behind with a, you know, littered, where they used your think pieces for kindling all those years? Is that the case? Is that what's happening? And I think that's exactly what's happening. He wants to do the, it's still good, it's still good.

Where he's like running around and chasing the pig as it's like flying down the road or whatever. Democracy is Homer's pig that he was trying to roast and this guy is chasing around being like, it's still good, it's still good, it's still good. Cause he's the one who fucking pushed it down the hill. He helped push it with all the rest of those people. Yeah, man.

Yeah, a thousand percent. This is a think piece ahead of calamity to try to promote Republican and conservative ideas and agendas, and then do a mea culpa, but when it all turns around and blows back in your fucking face, you don't get to do it. Hey, David, apology, not fucking accepted. This is your fault. It's the fault of the, of the intellectuals as much as the populists. It's your fucking fault.

It's the fault of Mitch McConnell in exactly the same amount as it is Donald Trump. Because one doesn't exist without the other. One beget the other. And you know, when he's talking about, in the beginning when he's mentioning that it's all this woke bullshit and they're trying to silence all these, they went out of their way to purge the roles

at all these places and you're like watching what the Republican party is doing now, this major backlash against people without any power. We're seeing them nab students who happen to be at a protest. They're snatching them up and trying to use immigration laws to grab them and snatch them and send them back to their country of origin. We're seeing them hand ultimatums off to higher education institutions. We're seeing them do the same thing with states where they're saying you better follow the rules

or we're gonna cut off certain things that we have already promised you or we're gonna make your life more difficult. We've seen them do all of this. You don't see any of that in this article, right? You don't see any of the, you know, like the overreach that they've done in order to quote unquote, combat the things that David Brooks might not like. He's not talking about any of that stuff at all in this article. He's sort of

vaguely waving toward it, but he's not bringing up any of those specifics at all. He doesn't. This is a guy who after the, you know, after he sort of visited Auschwitz is like, you know, maybe we're not, maybe the Nazis are the bad guy. Yeah, man. You know, he did a tour of Auschwitz. He was like, man, I don't know. I feel comfortable with this. Oh, yeah.

We should probably think peace about this. Yeah. You know, like, here's the thing. I did write a whole bunch of Nazi think pieces. Yeah right. But look, nobody could have seen this coming. Now I know that I was defending the Reichstag fire. I know that guy. I realized I brought marshmallows to the Reichstag fire. He's making s'mores.

I fucking hate this shit. Is there a way that like one of us could challenge this guy to a duel? Can one of us be like, hey, here's what I'll say. I will challenge him to a duel right now on the show. You choose the weapons, David. If it's fisticuffs, great. Swords, I'm cool. Pistols all day. No worries. All of it. I don't care what it is. If you want to somehow, if you can get us a scud missiles I'll do that too. I don't even mind sure whatever however you want to do it drones doesn't matter whatever it is

I'll ride one of those fucking like walkie robots in the battle Whatever it is, but I will say this after it's all said and done I'm gonna I'm gonna hold your pinky and I'm gonna press it up to the back of your fucking wrist and make you say I'm sorry. I'm gonna make you say it and I'm gonna make you mean it. That's what I'm gonna do. Not this fucking garbage, not this 2,500 word garbage tray you handed me.

Not like that, no, no, no. I'm gonna make you regret and mean it. That's what I'm gonna do. This is a shame on you moment. Shame, shame on this fucking shit. Can I be your second? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And I hope he brings like Ben Shapiro as his second

and we both have to, like you have to fight Ben Shapiro then I think that will work out amazing. No, no, no, you phrased that wrong. I get to fight Ben Shapiro. There's no have to fight Ben Shapiro then I think that would work out amazing. No, no, no. You phrased that wrong. I get to fight Ben Shapiro. There's no have to. Like I get there's some shit you get to do. Oh, yeah, how good would that be? Oh man. God, you'd squeeze him and he would squeak even louder than he normally does.

You'd be like a dog with a Kong. You would fill Ben Shapiro up with peanut butter. Why do I feel like if I beat up Ben Shapiro, I'd look over and be the first time his wife was ever wed? Sploosh. She'd be like, I wanted to do that. I've always wanted to do that. I've always wanted to do that. All right. Thanks so much for joining us for this very angry, very annoying article.

Thank you so much. And we'll be back on Monday with a full show, but we're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit couched in scientician double bubble toil and trouble pseudo quasi alternative acupunctuating pressurized stereogram pyramidal free energy healing water downward spiral brain dead pan sales pitch late night info docutainment leo pisces cancer cures detox reflex foot massage death in towers tarot cards psychic healing crystal balls bigfoot

yeti aliens churches mosques and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, small, intensely powerful wolverine, eating a sack of nuts out of my anus, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. speak stigmata nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonance pod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash DissonancePod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Preds, all under the handle at DissonancePod. This show is CAN credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment,

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