Matt Lech and David Griscom have done their best to carry on in Brooks’s niche, but Michael really had a unique blend of personality, knowledge and media savvy that nobody I’ve seen has replicated. He had a perfect understanding of “Overton window” respectability media sensibility while also being funny and scathing towards reactionary shitheads and expounding on some real materialist history and not folding to typical western anti-socialist kneejerk bullshit.
If anyone isn’t familiar with his work, I’d strongly recommend going back through The Michael Brooks Show on YouTube. Imagine a mid-2010s internet version of The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight with segments with interesting journalists and authors with some solid bonafides where the host has unapologetically socialist politics and doesn’t pull his punches while also being funny and charming and a talented interviewer. It always had a really great mood to the show. A lot of it probably feels dated from covering then-current events, but the fact that he’s missed by everyone from Majority Report libs to Chapo guys that guested in his show to Revolutionary Left Radio says a lot I think.
Yeah, I thought I was alone in this, but I really thought he was the perfect vehicle for spreading leftist ideas.
He could give materialist analysis in a casual way without watering it down. He could deal with reactionaries in a calm way without hiding his contempt. He was funny and scathing. Incredibly well read and informed.
I always envisioned him and Matt Christman as a perfect duo. Matt’s heavily materialist viewpoint mixed with Michael’s heavily spiritualist viewpoint and their shared ability to be a force of personality and knowledge when they spoke would have really meshed.
I miss Michael Brooks so much
Matt Lech and David Griscom have done their best to carry on in Brooks’s niche, but Michael really had a unique blend of personality, knowledge and media savvy that nobody I’ve seen has replicated. He had a perfect understanding of “Overton window” respectability media sensibility while also being funny and scathing towards reactionary shitheads and expounding on some real materialist history and not folding to typical western anti-socialist kneejerk bullshit.
If anyone isn’t familiar with his work, I’d strongly recommend going back through The Michael Brooks Show on YouTube. Imagine a mid-2010s internet version of The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight with segments with interesting journalists and authors with some solid bonafides where the host has unapologetically socialist politics and doesn’t pull his punches while also being funny and charming and a talented interviewer. It always had a really great mood to the show. A lot of it probably feels dated from covering then-current events, but the fact that he’s missed by everyone from Majority Report libs to Chapo guys that guested in his show to Revolutionary Left Radio says a lot I think.
Yeah, I thought I was alone in this, but I really thought he was the perfect vehicle for spreading leftist ideas.
He could give materialist analysis in a casual way without watering it down. He could deal with reactionaries in a calm way without hiding his contempt. He was funny and scathing. Incredibly well read and informed.
I really do miss him
“Be kind to people, be ruthless to systems” is such a perfectly succinct maxim of how western socialists should operate
I always envisioned him and Matt Christman as a perfect duo. Matt’s heavily materialist viewpoint mixed with Michael’s heavily spiritualist viewpoint and their shared ability to be a force of personality and knowledge when they spoke would have really meshed.
The CIA must have thought the same thing.