The Mind of David Brooks

For someone of very limited intellectual means David Brooks has done well for himself. Then again, his success might simply reflect on his audience.

And yet, when you read his most recent New York Times column you come away thinking that his understanding of cultural history can fit on the head of a pin. And that is being charitable.

Nowadays Brooks has his knickers in a twist because of President Donald Trump. He has run it through his pea brain and has decided that Trump is popular because he is a pagan. 

To be fair, we understand where Brooks got this silly idea. He would not be wrong if he suggested that certain elements of the right wing intelligentsia are pagan, in their behavior. Think the accused human trafficker and notable misogynist Andrew Tate. Or even the imbecile named Daryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist who has been touted as a serious thinker by no less than Tucker Carlson. Dare we say that Carlson has had better days.

Fringe elements like these do not define Donald Trump. It takes a special sort of mindlessness to conflate them all, to throw them all into the same pot, heat up and stir.

How does Brooks define paganism? Glad you asked?

The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess, and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness.

The pagan ethos has always appealed to grandiose male narcissists because it gives them permission to grab whatever they want. This ethos encourages egotists to puff themselves up and boast in a way they find urgently satisfying; self-love is the only form of love they know.

Of course, for those who have been thinking for more than a few nanoseconds, they will discover that Trump has staked some considerable part of his reputation on ending wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. During his first term, he did not lead the nation into wars and tamped down any tendency that others had to do so.

Brooks accuses Trump of having a callous tolerance of cruelty. And yet, Trump has said over and over again that he wants to stop the mindless slaughter produced by Biden’s wars.

As for self-love, by all indications Trump is a loving father and grandfather. His children are notably successful and well-adjusted. We cannot say the same about Joe Biden.

We must mention in passing that Trump has made himself available to the press for questions at a frequency that we have never seen before. Such behavior is not a sign of arrogance. It bespeaks humility. And Trump has shown a pragmatic attitude toward policy and governance, not what you would expect from a man who was exercising his will to power.

One might say that the pagan ethos is alive and well today in Islamist terrorism. Trump has pledged to destroy Hamas. We cannot say the same of America’s Democratic Party and of the leftist students who mindlessly march behind the banner of Hamas.

Trump has been fighting anti-Semitism. The Biden administration and the Democratic Party have looked the other way.

And then there is multiculturalism. As it happens, and as Brooks does not quite understand, multiculturalism is pagan idolatry. Multiple cults to multiple deities… it was the rule in ancient Egypt. 

In the Bible, Moses led his people out of pagan Egypt toward the new nation of Israel. Those who support Islamist terrorism and especially Hamas are returning to multicultural Egypt. 

To make this all clearer, we should mention, as we have in the past, that there are two versions of manliness. One does well not to confuse them. The first involves gentility; the second involves what we now call machismo.

According to Michael Carroll, in his book The Cult of the Virgin Mary, machismo is a caricature of masculinity that comes to being when the male members of a society fail at their most basic manly tasks, that is, to protect and provide for women and children. Of course, machismo is not an English word, which provides a hint.

According to Carroll, machismo comes into being when a culture becomes female dominant, where men have abandoned their traditional role or have simply failed at them. 

The alternative to machismo is gentility, a manliness that does not just involve protecting and providing, but that requires one to follow codes of conduct. It reminds one of the book of Leviticus, for example, which is chockablock with rules of proper conduct.

One ought to add that the two versions of manliness fought wars in the twentieth century. On the one side, Teutonic brutishness. On the other, Anglo-Saxon gentility. It does make sense that an imbecile like Daryl Cooper would choose to consider Churchill the villain and Hitler the hero. Conservatives would do well to disavow such nonsense.

Among the pieces of evidence evoked by Brooks is this: Trump seems to like to attend MMA events. To which one is tempted to respond: So what. One also notes that Trump is an avid golfer, and golfing is not a sport that involves macho brutishness.

As for the Brooks solution, he explains that it resides in religion. As he describes it, religion makes manifest a more feminine, a kinder version of human behavior. Like a refugee from therapy culture Brooks is trying to get us all in touch with our feminine sides”

If paganism is a grand but dehumanizing value system, I’ve found it necessary, in this increasingly pagan age, to root myself in anything that feels rehumanizing, whether it’s art or literature or learning. I’ve found it incredibly replenishing to be spending time around selfless, humble people who are still doing the work of serving the homeless, mentoring a lost kid who’s joined a gang. These days I need these moral antidotes to feel healthy, resilient and inspired.

He is correct to point to the resurgence of belief in religion across the Western world. But, does it mean that people are searching for more charitable feminine instincts, or is there something else going on.

One hastens to point out that people might also join religious congregations in order to belong to a social group, to find social cohesion. At a time when society is increasingly fragmented, where different groups are at each others’ throats, when national pride is considered to be a sign of criminal intent, people are drawn to religious institutions where they can feel like they belong to a moral community.

Sundaze

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Saturday Miscellany

First, so much is going on in politics that we sometimes miss interesting stories. 

Raylan Givens reports the influence of Harmeet Dhillon in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division:

The Washington Post reported that about half of the lawyers in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division resigned after the new head of the division, Harmeet Dhillon ordered her team to focus on combating anti-Semitism, transgender women's participation in women's sports, and "woke ideology"

Take a deep breath. They were sorely offended to work on anti-Semitism and woke ideology, to say nothing of transmania.

Second, from the man who denounced the Democratic Party as a bunch of preachy females. James Carville doubled down on his judgement:

“I think the Democratic Party has what I would call an NPR problem. You know, don’t eat hamburgers, don’t watch football, don’t drink beer…. It’s all bad for you. Like god damn, man, you know, get off my ass for a minute! And I think it’s something like that. I think Democrats come across as like culturally superior, ‘we know what’s good for you.'”

Third, the Department of Health and Human Services has completed a review of treatments for gender dysphoria, that is, for  transmania. It concluded that sufferers need behavioral therapy, not mutilation.

The New York Post reports:

A sweeping review of transgender treatments on minors found “deep uncertainty about the purported benefits” of many of those interventions — and urged doctors to put more of an emphasis on behavioral therapy when addressing gender dysphoria.

Researchers also concluded that many of the protocols for treating children with gender dysphoria became widely used before outcome studies determined whether or not they were safe practices, a massive 409-page Health and Human Services study revealed.

“The umbrella review found that the overall quality of evidence concerning the effects of any intervention on psychological outcomes, quality of life, regret, or long-term health, is very low,” HHS’ Gender Dysphoria Report determined in its assessment of common studies on transgender treatments.

“This indicates that the beneficial effects reported in the literature are likely to differ substantially from the true effects of the interventions.”

Who knew?

Fourth, in the ongoing negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, a new obstacle has appeared. It’s the European Union:

The European Union at this point seems much more open about its willingness to sabotage Trump efforts toward achieving peace in Ukraine. 

The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has told the Financial Times in a fresh interview this week that the bloc will not recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea under any circumstances. Really, this should be the most obvious and 'easiest' concession to make, but alas Brussels is saying no!

Chay Bowes adds a footnote to the process:

Kaja Kallas, the grossly inept "Diplomatic Chief" of the EU lies through her teeth in Munich She suggests Russian civilians haven't died in Donbass, Crimea, Belgorod, and Kursk. Thousands have. The fact that EU and NATO cash / weapons have done the killing demands she lies

Of course, you have never heard of her. Neither have I. Isn’t it time to take some distance from the Ukraine peace process?

Fifth, over on the other side of what they call the pond, the BBC has been doing its bit to promote anti-Semitism. This, from TGIF at the Free Press:

Several BBC Arabic journalists have been openly calling for the death of Jews, according to a new Telegraph investigation. To take one example, Samer Elzaenen, a Gaza-based BBC contributor, once posted to Facebook that his message to “Zionist Jews” is: “We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.” He posted to Facebook in 2022: “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.” What an interesting policy point! He has appeared on the BBC’s Arabic channel more than a dozen times as a balanced newsman, posting pics in a press vest, reporting soberly from Gaza. It remains to be seen if a statement so subtle and clearly just related to Zionism will impact his role with the network. He simply wants to burn Jews, like Hitler did. What, now that suddenly crosses a line with you snowflakes? What did you think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers?

Sixth, what do you get if you walk up to a man on the street and shoot him in the back? What do you get as a reward for such a manifest act of cowardice?

If you live in San Francisco, you get your very own musical comedy.

Newsmax has the story:

A musical-comedy based on alleged murderer Luigi Mangione is set to debut in San Francisco this summer, KRON4 out of San Francisco first reported.

"Luigi the Musical" is being sold as a "story of love, murder and hash browns" according to the press release and will open June 4 at the Taylor Street Theater.

Last week, Mangione pleaded not guilty to federal murder charges in the execution-style assassination of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson. Prosecutors formally declared their intent to seek the death penalty if convicted.  

Seventh, from detransitioner Elle Palmer, some good news, from Montana:

Montana Governor @GovGianforte is about to get a bill on his desk that extends the statute of limitations for minors who transitioned to age 27 so they can sue the doctors who performed experimental gender medicine on them. When he signs this bill, I can sue Planned Parenthood.

Clearly, transmania will be done in by lawsuits. Surely, this is a good thing.

Finally, I now have several open consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested, email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

Don't Be Too Nice

At first, the thought is intriguing. Social psychologist Tessa West recommends that you stop being nice at work. One applauds any effort to analyze human relationships outside of the family and within the workplace. 

It’s one thing to define human relationships in terms of love and aggression. It’s quite another to define them in terms of doing business.

And yet, one suspects that the advice is designed especially for women. No man who is worth his testosterone is trying to be nicer at work. Women, on the other hand, tend to avoid conflict and contention. They avoid confrontation and would rather be nice. Even to the point of being cloying.

One suspects that the behavior is written in female genes. If you are congenitally weaker you are naturally disinclined to avoid conflict and confrontation.

Tessa West describes niceness:

We smile as hard as we can, laugh (even when nothing is funny), and bend over backwards to convince people: There's nothing to worry about here. This interaction will be a positive one. I am nice. 

Apparently, we put on the niceness mask because we are uncomfortable. We want to hide our anxiety and we do so, West suggests, by…

“,,,  layering on the compliments, but when those compliments are delivered through artificial smiles, no one is buying it.”

Of course, this assume that the compliments are a product, for sale in a market.

Overly positive feedback signals that you're not paying attention — and you probably aren't, if you're too busy trying to regulate yourself. Over time, the person on the receiving end becomes distrustful of you. 

So, rather than lying by offering unearned compliments, West recommends that managers learn to offer “honest, useful feedback.”

So, when someone makes a subpar presentation, nice people are more likely to offer unearned praise. Of course, it depends on whether you are a manager or a colleague. 

West recommends that, instead of saying that the presentation was boring, a manager recommends pointing out that it had too much jargon. Does that feel like a consolation?

Specificity rules, according to her. Though, criticizing a presentation for having too much jargon is not as good as trying to extract a salient point and emphasizing it. Once the manager has found what was good in the presentation, he is better placed to recommend revisions.

Remember, a manager must motivate his staff. Telling people that their work sucks does not motivate them. If you see your proposal rejected in favor of a better one, are you likely to do your best to implement the winning proposal?

West recommends an honesty culture. But, if you explain that you thought the presentation was off the mark, then the presenter will have little incentive to improve it. Making him feel like a fool will not motivate him, either. Calling it an interesting draft, needing revision, is better than being thoroughly honest.

In truth, the more honest you are the more likely you will demotivate that staff member.

The important point is simple. West hints at it. A manager does best when he does not embarrass staff members by calling them out “honestly” in public. Maintaining group cohesion is at least as important as figuring out who has proposed the best marketing plan.

 

And Now, Princeton

Now that Harvard has come clean about the festering anti-Semitism on its campus, the nation’s eyes move to other Ivy League universities.

Harvard has just published a report it commissioned about campus anti-Semitism. It is not a pretty picture. Lawrence Summers explained it on CNN:

This is a searing report. It says what many of us have known for a long time, particularly that there are real issues of antisemitism on the Harvard campus. The report proposes, in quite constructive ways, a variety of steps that should have been taken some time ago but much more needs to be done by leadership if the campus culture is to profoundly change. 

As for Princeton, Christopher Rufo interviewed an anonymous professor for the City Journal. The professor explains that Princeton jumped head-first into wokeness:

Anti-Semitism is really a symptom of a deeper malaise at Princeton, which is that the university decided to go woke and—as President Eisgruber wrote in the last few months of the first Trump administration—declare that we were “systemically racist.” But if we have been systemically racist, it’s been against whites, Jews, Asians, and Indians, in favor of other demographics. We’ve always been told that we have to give special treatment to women and certain demographic minorities.

Those faculty members who speak out in favor of Hamas and against Israel are now being rewarded:

All the people who’ve been signing these anti-Israel petitions and going to the encampments are being considered for the top administrative positions. For instance, there’s a woman named Ruha Benjamin who has just been given the MacArthur Award. She led a group of students to take over a building here and then exited the building a minute before the police showed up. 

As it happens, Benjamin is a professor of African-American studies. Do the letters DEI come to mind?

But, Rufo asks, isn’t Eisgruber himself Jewish? Apparently, he is not as Jewish as it would appear.

Professor: No, hold on. He discovered he was Jewish as an adult. It was a very late discovery. It was something from Ellis Island that his son looked up. I don’t think he grew up Jewish at all. To me, again, the bottom line is this: he’s bought into the ideology that certain people are victims and certain people are oppressors. I think he’s bought into it completely.

Jewish or not Jewish, Eisgruber is thoroughly woke. He has ordered the removal of photographs of white males from university walls, even Jewish males:

A scientific department had displayed photographs of all the previous department chairs for the last 70 years—all white men, many of them Jewish. One day, all the pictures disappeared. The administration had removed them from the wall because someone found it objectionable that all these white men should be staring down at them. And yet, a number of those men were key in bringing black students to Princeton in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But none of that history matters: it’s just a bunch of whites faces, so they removed all the photographs, and no one objected—no one.

The anonymous professor offers a plan for attacking anti-Semitism at Princeton:

I want this university severely punished for its unlawful behavior. I want discovery; I want all the emails to come out that will make it very evident that this university was engaged in illegal discrimination. I want President Eisgruber subpoenaed before Congress to have to account for not only anti-Semitism, but for DEI and for the “systemic racism” arguments that he’s made. I want him to be publicly put on the stand. That’s what ultimately will deeply embarrass this university.

It sounds like a good plan.

Wednesday Potpourri

First, two days ago Spain and Portugal experienced complete and total blackouts. It was not just the lights that went out; the electrical grid went down.

Was it because they had both instituted climate friendly net zero policies? Or was it just serendipity that the moment they declared the electric grid totally climate friendly, it broke down.

Michael Shellenberger described the scene:

Six days ago, the media celebrated a significant milestone: Spain’s national grid operated entirely on renewable energy for the first time during a weekday.

At 12:35 pm today local time, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal, and parts of France. Although power was quickly restored in France, it could take a week to fully restore power in Spain and Portugal.

In an instant, the electric hum of modern life — trains, hospitals, airports, phones, traffic lights, cash registers — fell silent. Tens of millions of people instantly plunged into chaos, confusion, and darkness. People got stuck in elevators. Subways stopped between stations. Gas stations couldn’t pump fuel. Grocery stores couldn’t process payments. Air traffic controllers scrambled as systems failed and planes were diverted. In hospitals, backup generators sputtered on, but in many cases could not meet full demand. Cell towers collapsed under surges and outages.

Second, on the DEI front we have just seen the final report about the collision between a black hawk helicopter and a passenger jet a few months ago over Washington, D. C. 

Alex Berenson has the salient detail:

The @nytimes story on the January DC plane crash hides its takeaway until the last sentences: the lady helicopter pilot ignored multiple warnings from her right seat about altitude (and his directly telling her to turn away) and flew straight into a passenger jet.

Third, Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, was a favorite of the teachers union. So he led the march toward giving teachers more money.

How did that one work out? Glad you asked:

DEI: Chicago’s teachers insisted that higher pay would unlock student success. The city obliged, hiking per-student spending by 70 percent and boosting average teacher salaries to $100,000. 

The result? Failure on a grander scale. Today, just 11 percent of black students in Chicago are proficient in reading — a tragic monument to the bankrupt promises of a broken system.

Fourth, a few years back the grandees at Citigroup decided to grant their employees better work/life balance. You would imagine that serious business executives would be immune to such drivel, but, alas, they are not.

So, they opened a branch in Malaga, on the Costa del Sol, where they limited the time that staff would need to spend in the office.

Now, Tyler Durden reports on Zero Hedge, the three year experiment has run its course and the bank is closing the Malaga branch:

The good news is that without the work, former employees are going to have plenty of time to spend on their lives. The bad news is that they're not going to have much more money to spend. 

Citigroup is shutting down its Málaga office less than three years after opening the hub, cutting a few jobs and relocating others to London and Paris, according to FT.

Opened in 2022 during a fierce post-pandemic talent war, the Costa del Sol office offered junior bankers eight-hour days and work-free weekends, a sharp contrast to the grueling hours typical in New York and London

Fifth, what happens when a city adopts more progressive policies? Apparently crime and taxes both increase. Such is the case with London, England. The result is, more and more millionaires are picking up and leaving town.

Over the past ten years, London has lost some 30,000 wealthy residents. You can kiss the tax base good-bye.

The Epoch Times has the story:

Devin Narang, an Indian entrepreneur, said in a meeting attended by David Lammy, then shadow foreign secretary, that fear of crime in London was one of India’s elite’s biggest concerns about the city.

“People are being mugged in the heart of London–in Mayfair,” Narang, a member of the executive committee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said at a meeting in New Delhi in February 2024, the Financial Times reported.

“All CEOs in India have had an experience of physical mugging and the police [in London] not responding.”

Manchester United owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe also said that he had stopped wearing luxury watches in the capital.

Sixth, speaking of crime, Europe has a serious Muslim migrant problem. It should not be news.

Now, we learn that said Muslim migrants have gotten into the habit of burning down churches. Apparently, seeking sanctuary is not very high on their to-do list.  Nor is respecting the religion of other people.

Pamela Geller reports:

A church in Wales was set on fire by two Muslim migrants. Bethany English Calvinistic Methodist Chapel in Wales has stood since the 19th century. Over 1000 churches have been burned or vandalized in Europe.

British churches are vandalised an average of eight times a day, according to new data by the Countryside Alliance.

A freedom of information request reveals there were 9,148 records of theft, burglary, criminal damage, vandalism and assault between January 2022 and December 2024.

Over three years, there were 3,237 cases of criminal damage to churches – including arson.

Seventh, meanwhile, up north, the people of Canada were so offended by President Trump that they went out and elected a fool as their new prime minister.

Famed market strategist David Rosenberg, a Canadian, offers this commentary:

Only in Canada does the party that governed over a decade of unprecedented economic ineptitude get rewarded for a fourth term in office. Less a case of there being a fresh face with Mark Carney, who previously served on the sidelines as Justin Trudeau’s external economic advisor, and more a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’. Talk about getting fooled again.

Eighth, as the poet said, fear no more the heat of the sun. Apparently, the British Labour Party did not get the message. It is going ahead with a crackpot plan to block the sun, thereby pretending to solve the problem of global warming.

Benjamin Bartee reports for PJ Media:

“Experiments to dim sunlight to fight global warming will be given the green light by the Government within weeks,” British outlet The Telegraph reports. “Outdoor field trials which could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere, or brightening clouds to reflect sunshine, are being considered by scientists as a way to prevent runaway climate change.”

Don’t worry about the potential devastating and irreversible effects of blocking out the literal singular object that provides the basis for all life on Earth; the agency launching the project — the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) — assures the public its project will be “rigorously assessed.”

Ninth, just when you thought that Gen Z was growing up, or some such, we read this, in The New York Post. Apparently, Gen Z women are all addicted:

Gen Z women are abusing stimulants and binge drinking more than their male counterparts — and any other age group, new studies have found.

Nearly 37% of women ages 18 to 25 reported excessively popping uppers such as Adderall and Ritalin in the past year, more than double that reported by women older than them, according to a study published last month in JAMA Psychiatry.

Only 25% of women ages 26 to 34 reported improper use, according to the study. Women 35 to 64, who researchers said have seen largest rise in stimulant prescriptions, are abusing them the least — 13.7%.

Keep in mind, this cohort has been supersaturated with feminist thinking. And it has largely rejected the notion of marrying and having families.

Do these have any connection or is it just correlation?

But, that’s not all folks!

The alarming findings follow reports that young women are also out-drinking men for the first time.

A study published last week in JAMA of 267,843 men and women 18 and older found that 31.6% of women ages 18 to 25 reported binge drinking — consuming four or more drinks on one occasion — more than any other group.

The study compared men’s and women’s habits over two time periods, 2017 to 2019 and 2021 to 2023. It found that men’s binge-drinking levels plummeted nearly 8 percentage points, from 37.7% to 29.9%. But women didn’t see such a drop, falling only 4.8 percent from the prior years.

You’ve come a long way, baby!

Finally, I now have several open consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested, please contact me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com