Why David Brooks makes me want to puke

I really hate when liberals claim they like David Brooks, on the grounds that he's a "thinking man's conservative." He's truly no different than any of the other reactionaries in the media who relentlessly bash any kind of class-based change in America.

Today's column on the days leading up to the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. is a good example. He constantly equates angry, violent poor people with the angry, violent racists in power as if there is some moral equivalence between battered, dispossessed people standing up for their rights and the reactionary, fascists elements of society that formed a bulwark against change.

Around him in the front were the sanitation workers, with their concrete demands. But in the back of the crowd there were more radical and anarchic elements.

The looting and the rioting began almost immediately. King was whisked away. Hundreds were bloodied. One was killed. The authorities were driven both by the desire to restore order and by their own racist demons.

That march was a pivot. In both the white and black communities, the forces of order and reform vied with the forces of hatred and anarchy. The latter grabbed the upper hand.

Might doesn't make right, but when people have no other recourse, of course they're going to be violent if it means overthrowing an oppressor. To say otherwise is to take the side of the club-wielding fascists who were fighting against those changes. Not everyone was equally wrong!