I wanted to see if the article was as dumb as the headline…

It is.

It’s an opinion piece from some douchebag boomer who used to write for National Review.

Don’t forget the Times claims to be “independent” but that means a family trust owns it and it’s been run by generations of the same family

Regardless of how the current chairman’s great great grandfather intended it to be, generational wealth pointed it to fascism like generational wealth always does

Someone raised with that level of wealth just doesn’t think of us as people. They’re never socialized around people without 7+ figure trust funds. So we’re not “real” we’re an abstract concept to them.

I’ll say here what I said to the other guy: I’m not taking advice on leftist politics from a Republican.

It’s good to see that David Brooks is still out there somewhere, still with his baffling unique talent for being wrong and not saying anything both at once in the same editorial.

If Trump appeals the SNAP court order, that’s bad PR for the GOP.

No, no, Trump has stolen the Times! The lefties don’t give a fuck about it, though.

I noticed the striking similarities between the US Republican Party and the Russian Communist Party long ago. The lip service about “smaller government” while in reality loving victimless crime laws and big brother government. The love of dishonesty and disinformation. Encouraging followers to suspend all critical thinking skills and embrace shallow dogmas and cult of personality. Trying to rule through bullying and intimidation. Love of authoritarianism. The ultimate emphasis on raw power over ideology.

This stuff is especially ironic given the false claims of right wing kooks that anything they don’t like is “communist”. Republicans are the actual “communist” threat because they use the same tactics and have the same contempt for democracy as the Bolsheviks.

There is something to this: MAGA is appropriating revolutionary left-wing tactics, criticism, & rhetorical strategies for right-wing causes. They reformulate Marxist criticism by framing the cultural establishment as run by educated, left-wing elites (from elite universities) rather than the bourgeois. They’re criticizing

• objective truth with “alternative facts” & fake news (postmodern claims of who controls “the narrative”)
• globalization & free trade like leftists
• class struggle: the class of educated elites dominates other classes & needs to be overturn by a vanguard of MAGA revolutionaries employing Leninist tactics
• neutral institutions of society as veiled instruments of elite power that need to be discarded
• identity politics by twisting it: the cultural establishment of educated, left-wing elite oppressors persecutes the victimized group of white, evangelical Christians
• cultural power (driving politics) that needs to be reclaimed from the establishment in universities, public broadcasting, etc
• efforts by the left to shock society by shocking the left with offensive, right-wing edginess
• cancel culture: the right can also act like snowflakes & destroy the careers of those whose words that offend them.

They take all these familiar tropes from left-wing revolutionary rhetoric & twist them.

They even appropriate wokism. James Lindsay, who has experience getting absurd hoaxes published in multiple high-profile cultural studies journals, got a hoax that recasts the Communist Manifesto published in a conservative evangelical christian online journal. That revolutionary rhetoric & framing of society fits their rhetoric.

The Woke Right is Woke enough to argue against liberalism in exactly the same pompous and conspiratorial way (literally) Karl Marx argued against his own class enemy. So, if by “Woke” we mean running the Woke operating system and sociopolitical architecture, the Woke Right is clearly Woke.

They considered a lightly modified excerpt from the Communist Manifesto to be a “powerful article” for who they are and what they think

Lindsay also observes that this phenomenon is historically precedented:

Does this mean I’m saying the Woke Right are Communists? No, not at all. Historically, Fascism was a reaction to Communism that adopted the Communist operating system but not Communism or its specific agendas. In fact, they adopted the operating system of Communism specifically to be “anti-Marxist” (according to Mussolini)—just like the Woke Right.

And for those wondering: yes, I totally just summarized the article apparently few on here bothered to read.