First they came for the obscenely wealthy Times pundits, and I said...

Drawing by Eli Valley. Please do not explain in the comments what "awoke from uneasy dreams" refers to. Those who don't recognize the phrase can refresh their memory here.

Shorter Bret Stephens, "World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter", New York Times, 30 August 2019:

In commemoration of the German invasion of Poland 80 years ago on Sunday, I would like to note, as I often do, how frighteningly similar to those dark days our situation is now: with our rising dictatorships, failure of international organizations to stop them, and Twitter, which is practically the same thing as the Reichs-Rundfunk over which Hitler's propaganda was broadcast to 60 million Germans. Among the more haunting parallels is the dehumanizing rhetoric of infestation, in which people are associated with disease, or compared to bedbugs, of which all the examples I can enumerate seem to come from right-wingers, but I happen to know that the left is even worse.

Or, more precisely,

Only the chatter

One of approximately two known photographs depicting Donald Trump using a computer, from Motherboard. He seems to think one plays it by waving at it, like a theremin.

For the record, Donald J. Trump did not Google himself; he still doesn't know how to use a browser. This morning's terrifying tweets (which he entered at some incredible hour like 3 or 4 AM, and then deleted, redoing them, or having somebody else redo them, as a properly constituted threadlet, a little after 8:00)—

....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018

—are based on a piece by Paula Bolyard in PJ Media, datelined 25 August,  after she Googled "Trump" in the news tab, nominally showing that Google's algorithm is darkly influenced by Democratic math I should say a lot of sources suggested this, but none of them gave s link, so I'm not going to try to credit them):

Pierre Bourdieu, bitchez

Pierre Bourdieu could. Or at least he could explain it.

Shorter David Brooks, "Getting Radical About Inequality", New York Times, July 18 2017:

Recently I took a friend with no more than a high school diploma to her name to listen to some music. Insensitively, I brought her to a well-known conservatory, where one of the faculty members was presenting all of the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on the harpsichord. Suddenly I saw her face go dark and panicky as she looked at the program and its unfamiliar words like "prelude", "fugue", and "C major". Quickly, I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and with a fearful gesture she assented and we went to the Pops, where they played Strauss's Beautiful Blue Danube. 

Well, not really. He doesn't refer directly to last week's "How We Are Ruining America With Our Filthy Elitist Capicollo Sandwiches" at all, in fact; but it's carrying on the same argument, about how people like him use a set of cultural signifiers to shut out the mob from their councils and amusements and he feels bad about it, I guess, but at least that proves there's no need to redistribute the money, we just have to redistribute the Italian delis.

Only in a different key, you see, appealing to the late, (sort of) cultural-Marxian sociologist Pierre Bourdieu ("I’m not in the habit of recommending left-wing French intellectuals, but..."), who, believe it or not, kids, turns out to think exactly like Brooks! I mean, except for the Marxian part:

How Brooks Makes Paragraphs

Conrad Veidt in Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari (1920). Image via WolfInAGorillaSuit.

Shorter David Brooks, "How ISIS Makes Radicals", New York Times, December 8 2015:

The crucial issue in the terror attack in San Bernardino is really, how is it possible for an Islamic State headquartered in some stranded desert post in Syria to radicalize a couple in the Inland Empire of southern California, what "technology of persuasion" flings its influence all the way from there to here?

(1) The best place to look for an answer is still Eric Hoffer's 1951 book, The True Believer, because although it doesn't perhaps have anything to say about winning hearts and minds by remote control, it certainly provides us with stuff I can spin out for ten paragraphs worth of paraphrase and direct quote;

(2) Probably they use the Internet.

I have a strong feeling I know how he got to the celebrated longshoreman philosopher of the 1950s, Eric Hoffer, to find out that he was the "best source of wisdom" on the radicalization issue, which is namely the autogooglotic technique, or self-googling. Because the last time he published an explanation of how people get radicalized, in February, John Huckans at Book Source Magazine picked up on it in his own piece on, precisely, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, in reference to a quote from Hoffer:

Autogooglotic asphyxiation

Today's Brooks ("The Big University") starts out looking pretty deadly ("Not that one again!"), but it does have its funny side, which I discovered more or less by accident.

Many American universities were founded as religious institutions, explicitly designed to cultivate their students’ spiritual and moral natures. But over the course of the 20th century they became officially or effectively secular.

Religious rituals like mandatory chapel services were dropped. Academic research and teaching replaced character formation at the core of the university’s mission.

Administrators and professors dropped spiritual language and moral prescription either because they didn’t know what to say or because they didn’t want to alienate any part of their diversifying constituencies. The humanities departments became less important...

I'm thinking yeah, if you mean Harvard and Yale and so on, because they were founded as divinity schools, to prepare preachers, and cultivating spiritual and moral natures was part of the job description. It was when they started putting out doctors and lawyers and congressmen that things began to change, right?

Libenter enim suffertis insipientes

Image by C.E. Brock, 1898. From Golden Bridge Inmate.

Preliminaries

Sometime last week David Brooks was reading, or at any rate looking at, last March's issue of Foreign Policy; to be exact, it was the first page of Tina Rosenberg's profile of an American human rights statistician who documents mass murder and genocide all over the world, Patrick Ball. Was he really planning an article on mass murder and genocide, or for that matter on statistics, subjects he would surely regard as indecorous, ungrateful, and outside his usual beat? We will probably never know. But we do know what the article was, because he describes it unmistakably:

Recently I was reading a magazine profile of a brilliant statistician. The article mentioned, in passing, that this guy doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

I mean, how many magazine profiles of statisticians are there in a given year? And how many of those note their statistician's attitude to suffering fools at the bottom of the first page?

As to what happened next, it's a bit of a mystery. Before we proceed to that, though, I need to introduce a few suspicious characters. [jump]