David Brooks has written some really great stuff over the years at the Quasis: "A Humble Hawk" in 2004; on the South Carolina Democratic primary, March, 2020; the amazingly prescient "What Will You Do if Trump Doesn't Leave?", Sept. 3, 2020.

But Brooks is an odd man who struggles to keep his personal life and all its tics and quirks hidden, but which occasionally bubbles over in his writing. He mis-quotes, mis-reads, mis-characterizes, or mis-understands sometimes. To be sourced by Brooks is load your professional reputation into a revolver and take your chances. He writes out his ass sometimes, just making stuff up, as he did, obviously under the influence, with that Newark Airport tweet, and as he did in 2019, creating out of half cloth a fictional American fanatic in Brooksian, drunken gobbledygook.

Did you really think you could raise me on gourmet coffee and yoga pants and I wouldn’t find a way to rebel against your relativism and materialism?

"Look: What." I have no idea what that means or what Brooks intended by it or if he intended anything at all or if he was just enduring a dissociative state.

Didn’t you observe the eternal pattern — that if you try to flatten a man to the bourgeois he will rebel by becoming a fanatic?

 He has a drinking problem but I feel confident that is not his only problem.