"I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. I am one of those fanatics on the alt-right and the alt-left..."

"... the ones who make online forums so vicious, the ones who cancel and call out, the minority of online posters who fill the air with hate. I’m one of those radicals whose rage is intertwined with psychological fragility, whose anger at real wrongs is corrupted by my existential panic about myself."

David Brooks understands you from the inside!

"To know anything about me you have to understand the chaos at the core of my innermost being. I was raised without coherent moral frameworks. I was raised amid social fragmentation and division, the permanent flux of liquid modernity...."

Mmm. Liquid modernity.

"I yearn for order. Blunt simplicities. Politics provides the Manichaean binaries I can’t find anywhere else, and so I make everything political. Own the libs! Smash the racist right! A war of pure good and pure evil. I crave the single narrative that will make everything clear: Everything is race. Everything is class. Everything is moral rot caused by godlessness. They say that fundamentalism is rigid and authoritarian. I say to them: Yes! I want fundamentalism. Please wrap me in that rigidity...."

Wrap me in that rigidity... Now, I'm getting distinctly uncomfortable, David. This fantasy of the inside of other people's head... it's unsettling. And the semi-concreteness of you metaphor bothers me. In my world, things used for wrapping — blankets, aluminum foil, tissue paper — are flexible.

"From the abstract vantage point of my computer screen, I see a world in which my opponents are elite oppressors and my kind are oppressed. They have their exclusive cliques and I am disdained. And here we get to the ultimate injustice: Why are they recognized while I am not? This is the molten core from which my indignation flows...."

Molten! We're getting back to liquid.

"So my politics is not really about issues...  You stumbled? I delight in crushing you! Owning the libs spares me the terrifying ambiguity of actually getting to know one...."

The libs?! Suddenly the fiend Brooks is channeling is a right-winger? Initially, he was "one of those fanatics on the alt-right and the alt-left." Now, we know which one.