Has The Atlantic sold her soul to the devil of click-bait?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Nov. 25, 2024 – David Brooks, who shares his gifts among select elite institutions such as Yale, the New York Times, PBS, and The Atlantic, has announced, in the December 2024 issue of The Atlantic, that the terrible event of Nov. 5, 2024 was brought about because “A group of well-meaning college administrators decided, in the middle of the 20th century, that they would segregate America by intelligence.”
With that statement, Mr. Brooks has wandered so far from the facts on the ground, that one wonders if his compass has been compromised. Since education is an individual responsibility, and since college is not compulsory, how could a den of deans have done the dastardly deed Mr. Brooks accuses them of?
How could anyone as intelligent as Mr. Brooks put both segregation and middle of the 20th century together in a sentence without a momentary meditation on the monstrosity of segregation, not only in public education, but throughout the nation?
Elites in the south owned plantations and people
Mr. Brooks and everybody else knows that segregation was and is the product of slavery, and it’s codification throughout the slave states was an attempt to whitewash the sin of slavery. It was an attempt to absolve the innocent from the guilt accruing to an aristocratic elite of plantation owners.
The elites who dreamt up Jim Crow to vitiate re-construction and keep alive the nightmare of the confederacy used the machinery of education for the purposes of political indoctrination.
Mr. Brooks earns the price of his article, because his blame-throwing will generate considerable outrage, and that’s all The Atlantic cares about – engagement. May it rest in peace alongside another supporter of Mr. Brooks, the New York Times, whose sponsorship of the cynical click-bait scheme, The 1619 Project, has stripped it of trustworthiness.
Mr. Brooks now stands alongside a more colorful fellow republican, Spiro T. Agnew, who referred to people with elite educations as “effete snobs,” “hopeless, hysterical, hypochondriacs of history,” and – my favorite, “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
I’d bet my last dollar that our Mr. Brooks knows about an earlier Mr. Brooks, one whom history will never forget. That Mr. Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, bashed-in the head of Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachussetts, on the floor of the United States Senate, over the issue of slavery.
That Mr. Brooks, a coward and a bully, was in favor of slavery, while Mr. Sumner, a courageous public servant, was an avowed abolitionist.
Our Mr. Brooks must know that Ralph Waldo Emerson also was an abolitionist, and he should know that Emerson was among the elite friends of Mr. Sumner who established The Atlantic, as a weapon of abolition, the year after the terrible event of May 22, 1856.