The Atlantic staff writer David Brooks is supposed to be PBS News Hour’s Friday conservative weekly news recapper, but he often sounds indistinguishable from MS NOW host Jonathan Capehart. However, he occasionally stumbles into an aggressive form of centrism, where he condemns just about everyone, and Friday was one of those occasions. Looking at the state of discourse in the midterm Senate races, Brooks lit into everyone, including Democrats Troy Jackson, Abdul El-Sayed, and Jon Ossoff as well as El-Sayed’s GOP critics and Mike Collins.
Brooks began with a general lamentation, “I think something has changed since 2006, which is we have had 10 years of political, moral decay, and sound a lot—the candidates used to be inhibited a bit by the sense that if I lie, if I'm a total sleazebag, it might hurt me. And now they realize it won't hurt me at all. And, in fact, my partisans may actually like it.”
David Brooks was aggressively centrist on PBS last night, "I think, in those three cases, all three of those things were sleazy behavior, Troy Jackson. Susan Collins has some Boeing stock in her portfolio. And he calls her a war profiteer because of that? That's ridiculous. The… pic.twitter.com/s4AfIXs4IH
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) October 10, 2026
Starting in Maine, Brooks lamented, “I think, in those three cases, all three of those things were sleazy behavior, Troy Jackson. Susan Collins has some Boeing stock in her portfolio. And he calls her a war profiteer because of that? That's ridiculous.”
While Brooks’s centrist has the benefits of bringing up rare PBS criticisms of Democrats, it does have the downside of unfair criticisms of the GOP, such as “The insinuations that El-Sayed is involved in terrorism because he's Muslim, ridiculous.”
Nobody has suggested El-Sayed is involved in terrorism because he’s a Muslim. They have pointed out his mother worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which was indicted for violating U.S. sanctions on Iraq. That organization was an affiliate of the Islamic African Relief Agency, which the Treasury Department designated as a terrorist facilitator for funding Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and others.
Additionally, El-Sayed’s sister has praised October 7, and El-Sayed himself has said the American response to 9/11 was worse than 9/11 itself, and, of course, he had the infamous “hurt people, hurt people” response to the Temple Israel attack.
However, Brooks moved on with criticisms of both Georgia candidates, “Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it's time to shut up. That's just not what we do here in this country. And the Bull Connor stuff—and a lot of these candidates have real weaknesses. Like, Mike Collins, who's the Georgia Republican, I think what's accurate to say about him is, he has a disturbing number of young men on his—around him who have ties to the alt-right and some of the vile anti-Semitic stuff online.”
Returning to El-Sayed, Brooks declared, “He can't tell the difference between Iran and Israel. When asked whether—which was a greater threat, he couldn't tell the difference. Iran has killed thousands of Americans. Iran is the leading cause of—or leading sponsor of terrorism around the world. If you can't tell the difference, then something's wrong here.”
El-Sayed also claimed he couldn’t comment on the death of the ayatollah because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.”
Brooks concluded with another general lamentation, “And so they could have gone after legitimate weaknesses. But in each case, they took it to 11 and it was dishonest.”
The GOP’s criticisms of El-Sayed were not dishonest, but at least PBS viewers got to hear some criticisms of Democrats for a change.
Here is a transcript for the October 9 show:
PBS News Hour
10/9/2026
7:38 PM ET
DAVID BROOKS: Some—I agree with Jonathan, but I think something has changed since 2006, which is we have had 10 years of political, moral decay, and sound a lot—the candidates used to be inhibited a bit by the sense that if I lie, if I'm a total sleazebag, it might hurt me. And now they realize it won't hurt me at all. And, in fact, my partisans may actually like it. And so you had—I think, in those three cases, all three of those things were sleazy behavior, Troy Jackson. Susan Collins has some Boeing stock in her portfolio. And he calls her a war profiteer because of that? That's ridiculous.
The insinuations that El-Sayed is involved in terrorism because he's Muslim, ridiculous. Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it's time to shut up. That's just not what we do here in this country. And the Bull Connor stuff—and a lot of these candidates have real weaknesses. Like, Mike Collins, who's the Georgia Republican, I think what's accurate to say about him is, he has a disturbing number of young men on his—around him who have ties to the alt-right and some of the vile anti-Semitic stuff online.
El-Sayed can—
AMNA NAWAZ: Who have shared, we should say, white nationalist content online, right.
BROOKS: Right.
NAWAZ: That's the accusation.
BROOKS: El-Sayed, he can't tell the difference between Iran and Israel. When asked whether—which was a greater threat, he couldn't tell the difference. Iran has killed thousands of Americans. Iran is the leading cause of—or leading sponsor of terrorism around the world.
If you can't tell the difference, then something's wrong here. And so they could have gone after legitimate weaknesses. But in each case, they took it to 11 and it was dishonest.
