Degrees of separation from ‘the Epstein class’

I have never met the New York Times columnist and armchair sociologist David Brooks, but I know a lot of people who have.

Brooks went to high school with my ex-laws at Radnor High, and they knew him there a little bit, even though they came from different sides of the tracks in the Mainline suburbs. (Metaphorically — his family’s home in St. Davids was on the same side of the R5 as the Garrett Hill row-home they grew up in, but he lived “on the Mainline” and they lived in Delco.) Brooks has visited the terrific Wayne cafe owned and operated by my ’90s roommate. And years ago both David Brooks and I enjoyed chatting with the book-obsessive proprietor of the Reader’s Forum in Wayne, which was a short walk from where he went to high school and I went to college a few years later.

The reason I know about all of these one-degree-of-separation connections to Brooks is because he’s often written about this area and about places I know very well. But he’s written about them in ways that the rest of us here find unrecognizable. His description of my old friend’s cafe was offensively and deliberately distorted. He described the Reader’s Forum as a newly emerging “Bohemian” trend when it was a shop his own parents had frequented since he was a child. That was in a chapter that also wholly neglected the small-chain bookstore down the block where my then-girlfriend was once the manager because its existence didn’t fit his thesis.

That was all from Brooks’ 2000 book Bobos in Paradise about the supposed “new upper class” of “Bohemian bourgeois elites.” It’s an odd book that practices a kind of Jeff Foxworthy approach to sociology, but without Foxworthy’s affection or precision. If you’ve never eaten at an Applebee’s salad bar … you might be an out-of-touch Bobo Elitist. (Oh, you say that Applebee’s doesn’t have a salad bar, and my example of how out of touch you elitist liberals are just proves that I’m the one who’s out of touch? Well, nevertheless, you elitists still need to stop talking about climate change and racism and learn to connect with the real concerns of real people.)

Brooks was still milking this same shtick decades later, trying to make capicola a symbol of the out-of-touch snobby elitism of weird Bohemian liberals. As though the most basic ingredient of the Wawa hoagies we’ve all been eating for generations was a brand new “elitist” trend that symbolized the cosmopolitan condescension of liberal elites, thus explaining and justifying the backlash of Trump’s right-wing populism.

All of which is to say that I’m not a fan of David Brooks. I do not trust him because I have ample, personal evidence that I cannot trust him.

But I was still surprised to read this: “New York Times columnist David Brooks appears in latest Epstein photos.”

The New York Times columnist David Brooks appeared in multiple photos from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein that were released on Thursday by the House committee on oversight and government reform.

The photos, which have been rolled out in batches by the minority Democrats in the committee, lack crucial context, including dates and locations. But the photos appear to show Brooks attending a lunch or dinner event. Brooks is shown seated next to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google.

In a statement, the New York Times said the event took place in 2011, three years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to charges of solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18.

The Times said that Brooks, who did not respond to a separate request for comment, had no further contact with Epstein.

To be clear, and to be fair, these are not pictures of Brooks “hanging out” with the notorious child-rapist and human trafficker. They are, instead, pictures of David Brooks attending a fancy dinner event that was also attended by Jeffrey Epstein.

The Times defended its columnist in a statement that said: “As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event. Mr. Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.”

There were a lot of people at this event — including Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos, but it certainly was not “widely-attended.” The width of attendees — billionaires and columnists perceived as friendly to the interests of billionaires — was extremely narrow.

All of which casts a sallow-eye on the Times column Brooks published last month in which he pooh-poohed the Epstein scandal as an unwelcome distraction and wrote this:

I know a thing or two about the American elite, ahem, and if you’ve read my work, you may be sick of my assaults on the educated elites for being insular, self-indulgent and smug. … But the phrase ‘the Epstein class’ is inaccurate, unfair and irresponsible. Say what you will about our financial, educational, nonprofit and political elites, but they are not mass rapists.

True. Most billionaires are probably not Epstein-style mass rapists. Some — like Epstein and former Prince Andrew — certainly are. Others are aware of that but never seemed to let it bother them. For many others, it’s probably just a matter of not wanting to look too closely at others lest they, in turn, look too closely at your own pattern of serially divorcing to remarry much, much younger women (ahem).

In any case, Brooks’ attendance at events like this clearly shapes his writing about “the educated elites,” but not in a way that he is willing to disclose to his readers. Again, the more you learn about the guy, the less you find you can trust his writing.

For all of that, though, the pictures of him and others at this narrowly-attended large event that was also attended by Jeffrey Epstein does not link Brooks to Epstein’s sexual crimes.

I’m forced to be charitable on that point because I have spent enough time in white evangelical church circles that I have also been, in multiple cases, only a few degrees of separation from people who turned out to be mass rapists.

Here’s one story from the end of that post:

Back in the 1990s, I had what I then considered the great honor and privilege of driving John Howard Yoder to the Philly airport. At the time, this was a personal high point — the opportunity to converse with a profound theologian whose books had challenged me and influenced my thinking in a major way. Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus was a powerfully important book in my life, but for most of the ride we discussed, instead, the Anabaptist/Baptist understanding of ordination that Yoder laid out in The Fullness of Christ. I mentioned that book, citing one part of his discussion as significant to me, and the great theologian was off to the races on the subject — to my delight. My only regret was that I was unable to take notes while driving.

Later — many years later — I learned that even back then, the allegations of what was delicately euphemized as “inappropriate behavior” by Yoder were already an open secret, widely circulated and widely known. But I hadn’t known because I wasn’t someone who could be trusted to be told.

I was, rather, very much exactly the sort of person who could not be trusted and could not be told. Because I worked for Evangelicals for Social Action and for Ron Sider. I was, that is to say, a pro-lifer and an anti-abortionist — an adamant advocate of the assertion that women could not be trusted and must not be trusted. Trusting women, we insisted, was the source of the greatest moral evil of our time and we were unwaveringly committed to changing American law to ensure that such unworthy-of-trust women were legally forbidden to make decisions for themselves. Emphasizing the inconstancy and untrustworthiness of women was, for us, a moral obligation and a spiritual obligation. It was our identity.

We wouldn’t have put it like that, but just because we didn’t fully understand what we were saying didn’t mean we weren’t saying it.

And so, even though many people at that point knew that Yoder was a serial rapist, I was not one of those people. I was not someone capable of hearing that or of knowing that.

So I drove that warped predator to the airport. I opened the door for him and carried his bags and I thanked him for the privilege.

Six degrees of separation? That sick bastard was in my passenger seat. And I didn’t know because I was too busy loudly proclaiming that I was just exactly the sort of man who couldn’t be trusted with knowing.