The Unintentional Hilarity of the Far Left
I am neither a left-winger or a right-winger, and on social media that really ticks people off.
One time, “Odd Hack” tweeted out one of my Daily Beast columns with the tweet: “Thank you, vile reptile man.”
Another time, Glenn Beck enthusiast A.P. Dillon dug up the decade-old tax filings of a nonprofit I had co-founded, Hope Street Group, to reveal the group’s “Founding members have direct ties to … McKinsey.” Dillon hyperlinked the term “McKinsey” to the blog of Diane Ravitch, which hyperlinked to a blog called “Public School Shakedown,” which stated that McKinsey alumni were part of a plot to destroy public schools and make fabulous riches … by implementing Common Core Standards. Of course, I was shocked: all these other McKinsey alums were in on this big money-making scheme, and I was left out. What a fool I’d been.
A leftist swarm then dug in on Hope Street Group. A blog called “Education Alchemy” wrote a blog titled “The Road to Hell is Paved by Hope Street,” with content like “WHAT the HELL is HOPE STREET?” The site accused HSG of being funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and of, um, wanting data in policy.
When I started working with groups such as Democrats for Education Reform, the Democratic Underground posted a column called “Do you know who Dmitri Mehlhorn is?” The opening sentence was “Dmitri Mehlhorn (yes, that really is his name)” is “a union busting conservative shill with a name like a like a Groucho Marx character.” With regards to an article I wrote about my childhood and my mom’s teaching career, the fellow writes: “This Stanford, Harvard, and Yale-educated venture capitalist likes to portray himself as though he were a character out of The Grapes of Wrath.” When I posted this column on Facebook, number of my friends sent me photos from my childhood. One of them wrote: “You have been faking your identity since high school? I can’t believe I fell for your ruse. You’ve been posing as a bedwetting liberal since then… and you made up your mother, who I met when I was a teenager?”
Of course it’s not just the left. On the right, and more scary than funny, an American Nazi who uses Nazi physicist Philipp Lenard as his headshot responded to one of my columns by saying that it was a pity Trump wasn’t in charge of immigration policy when my family came to America, because “we would be better off without all of the nasty kikes that swarmed over here.”
In other words, like most centrist authors, I’ve gotten rage from both fringes of the political establishment. Sometimes it’s scary, sometimes unintentionally funny.
Like when I met Matt Bruenig
When Bernie Sanders was running for President in 2015, a blogger named Matt Bruenig wrote about me in a post titled “Here Come The Idiots.” Bruenig was responding to a column I wrote in the Daily Beast pointing out that Bernie Sanders was not actually advocating the policies of Denmark as he claimed (because Denmark likes balanced budgets and open trade and does not elect many socialists). Bruenig wrote that “idiots” like me, “uninterested in understanding how the Nordic countries actually developed, will mobilize their considerable googling skills to conclude whatever they want.”
At first, I took Bruenig’s criticism at face value. I did not recognize his Twitter headshot, which is actually of the renowned social justice philosopher John Rawls. Thus, I assume the photo — an older gentleman, perhaps of Northern European descent — was Bruenig himself. The fact that he misspelled my name — in the column he wrote about me — led me to take seriously his alleged disdain for “googling skills.” Clearly, I thought, he was an older gentleman with actual experience in the Nordic region. And he was right — my experience with Denmark was indeed limited: I had only interviewed a few retired legislators by phone, rather than traveling there in person. I had only met Nordic regulators and businesspeople in person when I traveled to other European capitals on business. He was right that I had used Google to download some of the research I cited in the Daily Beast piece.
So, I engaged Bruenig on Twitter.
That’s when I found out that Matt Bruenig is actually the guy in the pig ears whose picture is at the top of this post. He seems to have grown up in Texas, majored in philosophy at Oklahoma, and then gone to law school at Boston University where he graduated in 2014. He may not have even been in elementary school when Denmark was reforming its public sector in the 1980s. From what I can tell, Bruenig has never met any actual regulators or businesspeople in Denmark. THIS is the guy who accuses me of being uninterested in the actual history of Northern Europe, and of relying too much on Google?
I urged Bruenig, in case he wants to write about Denmark in the future, to do at least a couple of phone interviews with current and former policy-makers in that country. I reminded him that many of them speak English, and to keep the time zone changes in mind when he schedules interviews. I suggested to Bruenig that next time he joins the Idiot Police, he should not go so deep undercover.
He blocked me on Twitter.
Turns out Bruenig hates centrists with facts
Turns out, this attack from Bruenig puts me in good company. Some of my friends at think tanks want to start using the word “Brueniged” as a verb.
Consider his “debate” with Scott Sumner. Using his scholarship as an undergraduate philosophy major, Bruenig went after Sumner on monetary policy issues. Sumner, a left-of-center monetary economist, got his PhD at Chicago and has been teaching at university for three decades. In their exchange, Bruenig got facts badly wrong. As that happened, Bruenig chose to double down with slashing personal attacks.
Apparently, this approach has earned Bruenig a money-making audience on the fringe left. Although he was apparently fired from the left-of-center think tank Demos for unhinged attacks on widely respected writers and thinkers such as Joan Walsh of The Nation, Bruenig set up a Go Fund Me page to pay his bills while continuing to attack the “scumbags” and “idiots” who dared to challenge him or Bernie. Bruenig was able to rake in some quick cash from the slipstream of Bernies’ fundraising (which generally comes from well-heeled young white men employed in the technology sector). Within 24 hours of setting up his Go Fund Me, he’d raised $25,000.
Some of the folks who’ve been attacked by Bruenig have wondered whether they can tap Bruenig’s thirst for fame and money to shut him down more effectively. As one blogger wrote in the comments section of Sumner’s blog, “Kick some money into the kitty, we’re at $250 for Matt to debate me for 90 minutes. It’ll be a bloodbath. Matt won’t take any amount, it’ll ruin his proggie rep.”
