The first time I heard the term “grooming” in a public context was when Douthat wrote about how William F Buckley pressured him into skinny dipping. That boy has been shaped by weird people
It was in Douthat’s autobiography or something. Him and at least one other college-age guy were guests on Buckley’s yacht. It may have been Buckley’s thing
The mystery of the continued employment of Ross Douthat will be the topic of endless theses when people are getting degrees in the history of early 21st Century American journalism.
He does laundry, fabric-softening pro-capital and -imperial center-right reactionary ideology to make it comfortably non-itchy for the neoliberal middle-class masses.
OF COURSE he’s employed!
There is something deeply dumb about it so, yep, you’ve got it. He at the NYT is fluffy comfy mashed potatoes MAGA for the middle. Worthless & reliably dead wrong yet somehow popular.
It’s popular. The Fox formula, NYT version. Appeal to our fear & hatred rather than our capacity for clarity & understanding. I guess it’s harder (fewer 🍟) for them to actually report news.
He did a sit down with Tim Miller on the Bulwark and I think JV Last nailed it saying basically he just wants to go full MAGA but the aesthestics and his peer group make it difficult.
It's not about credibility. It's about quotability. What he says gets echoed in the right wing, to show that even the "liberal media" (HA!) understand how supposedly incompetent Biden is.
And there is no question that he is specifically writing for that audience.
What is the 2nd term danger supposed to be?
(not a subscriber, not going to subscribe to read a Douthat column, but don't waste a gift link, a summary or screencap will more than suffice)
His shtick is so tiresome. But I do enjoy noting that his books are straight-up elite level intellectual projections. Sustainable decadence, elite privilege, etc. Come on, man!
“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
— Malcolm X
"A noisy weakling" with dementia. I'm sure the people around Trump know that he has dementia. They might well be counting on it -- they'll get him in office, invoke the 25th Amendment, and get their own stooge in.
