Michael Brooks (political commentator)

Michael Jamal Brooks (August 13, 1983 – July 20, 2020) was an American talk show host, writer, political commentator, and comedian.

Michael Jamal Brooks was born on 1983, to Donna Brooks and Glenn Brooks, and grew up in Hampshire County, Massachusetts.

He had a younger sister, Lisha.

Brooks became involved in radical politics at a young age, joining the Northampton-based Revolutionary Anarchist Youth (RAY) at 11.

He also developed an interest in Buddhism, involving himself with the Insight Meditation Society and regularly participating in annual weeklong silent retreats.

Brooks attended North Star Self-Directed Learning for Teens and the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School.

He was accepted to the London School of Economics, but chose not to go.

Having first heard of Brazilian president Lula da Silva in 2003, Brooks began reading BrasilWire every day during Operation Carwash and the Lula Livre movement in order to deliver updates to viewers.

He attended Bennington College for a year before transferring and earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Bates College in 2009.

Brooks spent his junior year abroad studying European and Turkish security studies at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.

Brooks began his career in comedy and meditation, founding the Valley Arts Project and coaching seminars at Sati Solutions.

Along with his colleagues, Brooks criticized MSNBC for firing Seder over a tweet that he had made in 2009.

Brooks hosted INTERSECTION for Aslan Media and was an analyst for the American Iranian Council.

Brooks was known for his mixture of political analysis with comedy.

Bhaskar Sunkara said, "Michael could 'get away' with controversies because of how he mixed his comedy with earnestness."

Seder said, "[W]hat was unique about Michael was not just his intelligence and insight into politics, particularly foreign politics, but his ability to do genuinely brilliant political comedy."

In 2011 he co-authored a meditation guide, The Buddha's Playbook, with Josh Summers.

His early journalism and hosting work include his contributions to CivicActions, Talking Points Memo, and The David Pakman Show.

On returning to New York City in 2012, Brooks met Sam Seder and began working for The Majority Report with Sam Seder.

It also argues that a focus on deplatforming has harmed the left's ability to organize, drawing upon Mark Fisher's essay "Exiting the Vampire Castle" (2013).

It argues against essentialist thinking on the right and the left, and advocates a "cosmopolitan socialism" that is "open to all cultures and ... embrace[s] and encourage[s] cultural exchange and syncretism" as an alternative.

In Jacobin, Luke Savage called the book a "model blueprint for countering the reactionary narratives ascendant in the smoldering ruins of the neoliberal order."

In UnHerd, James Bloodworth called the book "the most substantial critique of the IDW and its brand of 'classical liberalism' to date."

Brooks was the author or co-author of several dozen published essays in outlets and magazines including Al Jazeera, Salon, and Jacobin magazine.

Some of his published essays are:

Brooks began co-hosting 2 Dope Boys and a Podcast in 2016 and announced in 2017 that he was starting The Michael Brooks Show.

The podcast, which was broadcast live on tour from a variety of venues around the United States, reached 131,000 subscribers.

It included interviews with Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Adolph Reed, and Slavoj Žižek.

While co-hosting The Majority Report with Sam Seder, he launched The Michael Brooks Show in August 2017 and provided commentary for media outlets, making regular appearances on shows such as The Young Turks. Brooks contributed to various publications, including HuffPost, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, openDemocracy, and Jacobin.

Brooks also wrote the foreword to the 2018 book Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil, also by Hunt and Mier, which documents the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

His book Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right was published by Zero Books in April 2020.

Brooks was a self-identified progressive, internationalist, democratic socialist, and Marxist humanist.

He commented extensively on US foreign policy, the Middle East, Latin America, capitalism, and the intellectual dark web.

In January 2020, he traveled to São Paulo to interview Lula alongside BrasilWire editors Daniel Hunt and Brian Mier.

From April 2020 until his death, Brooks co-hosted a YouTube show called Weekends with Ana Kasparian and Michael Brooks, a collaboration with Jacobin.

At the time of his death, Jacobin was planning to launch a second weekday webcast, The Jacobin Show, with Brooks as host.

Brooks contributed to various publications, including HuffPost, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, In These Times, Good Worldwide, Al-Monitor, openDemocracy, Jacobin and Jadaliyya.

He appeared on various networks and shows around the world such as The Young Turks, HuffPost Live, Al Jazeera English, France 24, Novara Media, CCTV, Rising and Hear the Bern, the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign's podcast.

On April 24, 2020, Brooks's book Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right was published.

The book is a critique of the popular figures associated with the intellectual dark web.