September 23, 2023

DAVID BROOKS MORPHED INTO VODKAPUNDIT SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: N.J. restaurant at center of David Brooks’ viral $78 Newark Airport meal running $17.78 special.

After reading the results of some social media sleuthing, Hallett no longer wondered where Brooks dined.

As an X post from Rebekah Jones pointed out using reference photos showing a similar burger and tables, it looked like Brooks had purchased a burger and fries from Hallett’s restaurant, Smokehouse BBQ, located in Terminal A at Newark Airport.

From the crinkle-cut fries to the burger garnish, Hallett, seeing the additional photos, immediately made the connection.

“I knew right away,” the restaurant owner tells NJ Advance Media.

Along with the fact that food and drink will often cost more at an airport, something else was glaringly apparent to many responding to Brooks’ tweet.

The conservative columnist, who as of late Thursday night hadn’t surfaced on X since posting the message, seemed to leave out a mention of the cost of liquor … if that was indeed what was in his glass.

David Brooks hasn’t been a conservative for almost two decades. In 2016, Glenn explored “How David Brooks created Donald Trump:”

“Trump voters,” [Brooks} wrote, “are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else. Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.” (Emphasis added.)

Well, it’s a lesson for a lot of people in the punditocracy, of whom Brooks — who famously endorsed Barack Obama after viewing his sharply creased pants — is just one. And if Brooks et al. had paid attention, the roots of the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t have been so difficult to fathom.

Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.

The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun.”

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Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.

So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash.

To be fair, “get in their faces and punch back twice as hard” was also the motto of the man with the brilliant trouser creases whom Brooks supported.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll