The sad demise of Brooks Brothers

Good-looking preppie or clubby men are out, but those ghastly bald types with beards are viewed as sensitive and with it

brooks brothers
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Brooks Brothers devotee but the store is seen as being out of step with Gen-Z and millennial customers (Bill Tompkins/Contributor)
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Our own Douglas Murray is the canary in the coal mine as of late. The left controls culture, education and technology here, but a few canaries are still free to warn the rest of us that we’re being taken for a ride. Here’s a warning to those multimillionaires who get down on one knee to make themselves feel better for getting lotsa moolah for playing a game in the sun. It has to do with black lives and whether they matter or not.

Black lives do matter, but not to those who run the racket that…

Our own Douglas Murray is the canary in the coal mine as of late. The left controls culture, education and technology here, but a few canaries are still free to warn the rest of us that we’re being taken for a ride. Here’s a warning to those multimillionaires who get down on one knee to make themselves feel better for getting lotsa moolah for playing a game in the sun. It has to do with black lives and whether they matter or not.

Black lives do matter, but not to those who run the racket that goes by the acronym BLM. According to Murray, writing in the New York Post, the biggest lie is the racket behind the rhetoric. One year ago the details of BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors’s real-estate empire emerged. She owned four homes and seemed to be shopping for more. And in April we found that BLM, funded by well-meaning gullible folk who gave generously to the cause, bought a $5.8 million California mansion. Cullors’s response was to call the revelations “racist and sexist.”

Far more important than the facts of BLM co-founder’s riches are some facts revealed by the Brit canary in the coal mine. Here’s what Douglas had to say in a nutshell: left-wing papers like the New York Times and Bezos-owned Washington Post, plus CNN and MSNBC, pretend that racism is a pandemic and unarmed black people in America are killed with impunity by the cops. Among liberals, 40 percent believe the figure is between 1,000 and 10,000 annually. The actual number in 2019 was about ten. For any of you who failed math at school, as I did, the big lie by the lefty media simply multiplies the number by 1,000. Just think of it for a moment. Platforms supposed to objectively inform the public leave them misinformed a thousand-fold in order to discredit the police, and to convince the world that Uncle Sam is a racist beast. Our old friend Zuckerberg did what was expected of him and classified the New York Post’s original exposé of Cullors as “abusive” and prevented it from being shared on his platform.

BLM originally claimed they would address the ills that plague America. The moolah rolled in and the organization bought a mansion in a chic area of El Lay. Big Tech buried critical stories. This is America today, a place run by hustlers who are protected by smarter hustlers eager to be woke icons. Otherwise, the Bagel is getting more violent by the minute, one recent incident involving a gunman shooting about ten people in a crowded subway car and stopping only when the Glock he was using jammed. He got away but his picture, age and name were posted while the fuzz was looking for him. The Times buried it, however, because the perp happened to be black.

There are of course reasons to laugh and be merry. All one has to do is look at the Times headlines. On April 12 in bold letters: “Woman Pleads Guilty to Tackling Black Teen in Lobby of Hotel.” To tell the truth, I think there is something very funny about a grown woman tackling a black youth in a hotel — mistakenly as it turned out, because he had not stolen her cell phone. A man-bites-dog story and funny because the paper treated it as though it were a major crime. American women tackle men all the time in hotels. In a more serious vein, accused murderers are automatically sprung every day because of bail laws that make it possible, but the word most heard and used around the Bagel is racism.

One has to laugh at this joke culture and the slow death of this once great city. I go out all the time and am yet to be nicked as crime goes through the roof, but I worry about my buddy Michael who lives in Brooklyn in the middle of all the carnage. And while politicians spin the violence in the Bagel, and the TV networks warn us about the dangers of white supremacy, the cops continue to be handcuffed and the criminals coddled.

The language, too, has gone south. While ghetto vernacular is in, a mid-Atlantic accent is almost a capital offense. This mindset has even affected the clothes we wear. Good-looking preppie or clubby men are out, but those ghastly bald types with beards are viewed as sensitive and with it. Brooks Brothers and Abercrombie served preppies these past 100 years. But who goes there now? Both were seen as being out of step with millennial and Generation Z customers. Papa Hemingway used Abercrombie for fishing and hunting gear, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Brooks Brothers devotee. Now both stores are disappearing, their demise hastened by an activist (read busybody asshole with a bald head and long beard) who demanded that Abercrombie make plus-sized clothing for the slobs that Americans have turned into.

That’s the good news I have for you from slob city this time. If I survive stray bullets over the coming weekend — I plan to eat out every day and even visit the park — I’ll have better news for you next month.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2022 World edition.