Frank Bruni, the New York Times’ first openly-gay op-ed columnist.
The stupid things said by Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, and other rightwing men receive lots of attention from sites like these. But you don’t have to be a crazy conservative to be dumb. One place that’s heavily populated with obtuse, biased men is the New York Times. Though not as explicitly ridiculous as Hannity or Jones, the men at the Times are nonetheless full of alt facts and foolish opinions.
David Brooks
A moderate conservative, Brooks believes Donald Trump is poisoning the world. For Brooks, Trump has no “foot in the realm of moral motivations.” Brooks’ examples of “moral” leaders? Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Regan. But Lincoln continued the genocide against the indigenous people, Churchill killed Africans and Indians, Regan did zip while gay men died of AIDS, and Roosevelt brought back capitalism. Really, Trump complies with Brooks’ definition of a “moral” leader. He delivers death and destruction, too. Trump’s war on ISIS kills at least 12 civilians a day.
Charles Blow
One of the few black opinion writers for the Times, Blow, like Brooks, has a distorted admiration for awful world leaders. Before Barack Obama’s presidency ended, Blow wrote an ode to him, praising him as “a man of principle” and of “dignity and respect.” Maybe Blow’s compliments would turn to censure if he lived in the Middle East and was subject to one of the 26, 171 bombs that Obama dropped in that area during the last year of his presidency. But I don’t think Blow will ever live in the Middle East.
Frank Bruni
The Times’ first openly gay opinion writer proves that gay men and straight men are equals, especially when it comes to being a bonehead. When Trump says anything that can be interpreted as sexist, the outrage is immediate. But when Bruni wrote about Ivanka’s Trump’s bitter scent, the subtle sexism received no backlash. When Bruni isn’t proffering subdued misogyny, he’s presenting Jewish people as eternal victims. Bruni could condemn Trump for conducting a war that kills 12 citizens a day, instead he’s upset Trump didn’t stop by the Holocaust memorial in Warsaw, Poland. Like Trump, Bruni is more comfy with shallow politics.
Nicholas Kristof
Trump loves Twitter and Kristof loves saving sex workers, he tells about his heroics over and over and over again. Kristof is one of the leaders of what journalist Melissa Gira Grant calls “the rescue industry.” For Grant, the girls in Kristof’s columns are “stock characters” in a “pity porn” that supports the staunchly simplified belief that all sex workers are abused and need someone else (preferably a white man) to tell their story and to tell them how they should and should not make money.
Ross Douthat
Like Brooks, Douthat is a conservative. Recently, Douthat tried to mansplain why Western nationalism isn’t necessarily racist:
Today’s Western nationalists argue, also plausibly, that many European distinctives are unlikely to survive if nation-states are weak, mass immigration constant, Christianity and Judaism replaced by indifferentism and Islam, and young elites educated as global citizens without knowing their own home.
This nationalist argument comes in racist forms, but it need not be the white nationalism that Trump’s liberal critics read into his speech. It can just be a species of conservatism, which prefers to conduct cultural exchange carefully and forge new societies slowly, lest stability suffer, memory fail and important things be lost.
First, white Judo-Christian society is stable: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have to be concerned about cholera and Jeff Bezos doesn’t have to worry about the “mother of all bombs” dropping on one of his newly acquired Whole Foods stores.
Second, there aren’t a lot of goods things to remember about white Judo-Christian society. Although, maybe Douthat, like Brooks, thought it was admirable how Lincoln kept killing indigenous people, how Churchill kept killing Africans and Indians, how Regan let gay men die of AIDS, and how Roosevelt mended the most murderous economic system ever.