Say it ain’t so – Gaslighting in The Atlantic?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Dec. 18, 2024 – The December 2024 issue of The Atlantic virtually leaps off the shelves of virtual newsstands, because the cover graphic practically mesmerizes everybody who ever hung dear old Alma Mater’s banner on their bedroom wall.
Ah nostalgia – that wispy, weepy longing for long ago, even if only a little while ago. O, if nostalgia were the only symptom of mental distress that cover represents!
“How the Ivy League Broke America,” by David Brooks, is Q Anon for Elites, even as ‘elite’ is being stuffed with straw to give the pundit class something to punch.
I’m predisposed to welcome an issue of The Atlantic, because it was co-founded by my hero and fellow citizen of Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Furthermore, as the son of an alumnus of the University of Toronto, as Mr. Brooks is, I’d have been delighted to find he travels the same direction as Emerson and I do.
Sadly though, Mr. Brooks is no fellow traveler, but works for the team that delivered today as sure as I once delivered the morning newspaper. He has not come to enlighten a state school alumnus like myself, nor is he intent to unburden the un- and anti-elite, who keep electing to high office creeps, frauds, liars, and thieves.
With his essay, Mr. Brooks serves crudités of specious reasoning designed to be consumed by the cocktail set, even as they share tips on how to find new help to replace workers targeted for summary deportation.
Brooks is as elite as they come, not that there’s anything wrong with that, some people are born that way. I was. Think of elite as one end of a spectrum, then make up your own mind toward which direction the journey of your life points. (There’s nothing inherently wrong with down either – otherwise gravity would be the work of the devil.)
God blesses Mr. Brooks with regular paychecks from across the elite spectrum, from the New York Times, The Atlantic, PBS, all the way to Yale. All the way to Elysian Fields is where you’re bound if his rationalization finds any traction in your mind.
Not even a blind man would suggest that racial animosity was irrelevant to the defeat of Vice President Harris. But to fix the blame for the infamy of Nov. 5 on who gets admitted to which college does nothing but add another layer of bullshit over the truth of the summer of 1964.
But it is bound to ignite plenty of sparkling conversation among the smart set, as eager for an explanation for the madness of the moment as are the hoi polloi, whose own fertile imaginations lead them to believe that elites such as Mr. Brooks takes pleasure in the exsanguination of babies, and other horrors I shant state.
The summer of 1964 is when the Party of Lincoln swallowed the poison peddled by bootlegger and turncoat Strom Thurmond. Any discussion relative to that party either begins with an analysis of its Southern Strategy, or it is a dishonest discussion.
Any discussion of the party now primed to inflict the hoi polloi with Project 2025 that doesn’t include a discussion of the designs and effects of the Attack on the American Free Enterprise System, commissioned by the first president elected via the Southern Strategy, is a dishonest discussion.
Shame on you for your callow gaslighting, Mr. Brooks, and shame on The Atlantic for promoting such watery yellow journalism.