From driftglass:
It did not go well.
“Fear stokes anger, which then stokes more fear.” — David Brooks, the Faith and Humility reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph
“Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.” — Yoda, The Phantom Menace
Because Mr. Brooks doesn’t fear privation of any kind — because in his rarefied world of extraordinary privilege the idea of starvation, or homelessness, or losing his job, or losing his health insurance, or losing his country are completely alien to him — for him, the idea of “fear” itself exists only as a free-floating abstraction.
For Mr. Brooks, fear is not a key survival-emotion honed by millions of years of human evolution, but an entity unto itself. Like the glowing, red alien flashlight-special-effect thingy in Star Trek’s Day of the Dove — a malevolent spirit which hovers above all of us, making us fight for no good reason but its amusement.
Mr. Brooks makes this breathtakingly stupid claim for the same reason Mr. Brooks makes all of his breathtakingly stupid claims: because Mr. Brooks has spent the last 15 years relentlessly clawing his way up to the exalted position of the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It. And as the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, Mr. Brooks is driven with the implacable zeal of a fanatic to false-equivalence the shit out of every issue, under all circumstance, in every venue he has available.
In this case, that means using his New York Times column to indiscriminately bulldoze everyone’s fears — legitimate or real — down to the same level of folly.