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The vote last Tuesday can be summed up in three words: "we've had enough." Post the election, progressives and radicals are proving how tone deaf they are because they apparently believe they need to pass more spending legislation. The inflation, their policies are causing, has eliminated whatever benefits the government handed over to the middle class and the increase in wages Trump accomplished for middle class America.
I hope these words clueless trickle down because their destruction of our country has been working.
They are obviously fed up with Biden's reversal of everything Trump accomplished simply out of peek. The man is totally befuddled.
By asserting Democrats lost because Republicans are racists is analogous to the former swallowing an IED.
The radicals lost critical elections in Washington State, in Minneapolis, in New York, New Jersey, in Virginia among other states. Maybe a two by four is not big enough to knock some sense into them.
Obviously conservatives are so racist they just elected a conservative black women as Lt. Governor of Virginia. How ''precious " was her victory. Semper Fi.
And:
Don't forget the collective mass media. They are dumber than a rock pile:
Don't forget the collective mass media. They are dumber than a rock pile:
How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class
What explains the media's obsession with race and power? It has very little to do with social justice and everything to do with class.
Batya Ungar-Sargon 20 hr ago
The headquarters for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
If you read this newsletter you are acutely aware of the transformation of the mainstream media over the last decade and, especially, over the past couple of years. But few have offered a fully satisfying answer to the question of why.
Why is it, for example, that between 2013 and 2019, the frequency of the words “white” and “racial privilege” exploded by 1,200 percent in The New York Times and by 1,500 percent in The Washington Post? Why was the term “white supremacy” used 2,400 times by National Public Radio in 2020?
What changed? Why was there suddenly a relentless focus on race and power? And who—or what—was driving it?
At last those questions have been answered with unusual clarity by Batya Ungar-Sargon in her new book “Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.”
Batya, who is an opinion editor at Newsweek, is hard to pin down politically. I first met her in 2018 and I would have described her then as woke. These days I’d call her a left-wing populist. (She’s part of an endangered species: a person willing to change her mind.) But what I appreciate most about Batya, and what I think you’ll find when you read the essay below, is someone who is able to put ideology aside and pursue to illuminate why the news is broken, how it is fueling one war (culture) to distract from another (class), and how that might be changed. — BW
On November 16, 2018, CNN’s Don Lemon hosted a panel discussion about white women who voted for Donald Trump. There was no real news peg for the story; the president hadn’t spent the morning tweeting about anything specific, and it was 10 days after the midterm elections. But Lemon valiantly torqued them into an awkward hook for the panel: “A wave of women, white, black and brown are sweeping into office after the 2018 election. Does Donald Trump still have the support of a majority of white women and if so, why is that?”
A Friday night capping off a slow news week was as good an opportunity as any to bring up the increasingly hot topic of white supremacy. In fact, the only remarkable thing about the panel was how unremarkable it was, one of a thousand such panels that have graced American airwaves in recent years.
Lemon’s guests were Kirsten Powers, a senior CNN political analyst; Alice Stewart, a CNN commentator playing the supporting role of token Republican; and Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a professor of history at UC Berkeley, whose book “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South” had been cited in an article on Vox, a progressive opinion site that caters to millennials.
Powers had much to say about Donald Trump’s female supporters. “People will say that they support him for reasons other than his racist language,” she told Lemon. “They’ll say, ‘Well I’m not racist; I just voted for him because I didn’t like Hillary Clinton.’ And I just want to say that that’s not, that doesn’t make you not racist. It actually makes you racist,” Powers explained. “As for why white women do it,” she went on, “I think we have to remember that the white patriarchal system actually benefits white women in a lot of ways.”
Professor Jones-Rogers concurred. “So, as a historian, I explore white women’s economic investments in the institution of slavery,” she said. “And what that has led me to understand is that there’s this broader historical context that we need to keep in mind when we’re looking at white women’s voting patterns today, and as we look at their support—their overwhelming support of Donald Trump.” Lemon jumped in to note that just over half of white women had voted for Trump—hardly what would constitute “overwhelming” support. Jones-Rogers clarified: “What I meant by overwhelming was emotionally overwhelming.”
The sole Republican, Alice Stewart, was briefly allowed to respond, and voiced her resentment at being called racist for her vote for Trump, whom she chose for his policies. But Powers interjected: It’s not just Republican women who have a problem with racism but all white women, indeed, all white people. “Every white person benefits from an inherently racist system that is structurally racist, so we are all part of the problem,” Powers said. Jones-Rogers heartily agreed. It was a scene as inescapable today as it would have been rare ten years ago.
For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic.
What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform. A moral panic around race is everywhere: In television segments like Don Lemon’s, and articles like “Is the White Church Inherently Racist?” and “The Housewives of White Supremacy” and “When Black People Are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs” and “How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror,” which have become the bread and butter of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Where did this obsession come from? The election of Donald Trump is often given all the credit. Trump was so extreme in his disregard of liberal mores, so willing to offend with comments that were sometimes casually racist—comments that were amplified and justified throughout conservative and right-wing news outlets—that American liberals, including the liberal media, swung hard to the left. This is true: The mainstream media certainly molded itself around Trump, whose presidency was a major gift to MSNBC and CNN and the New York Times—outlets that were facing a bleak outlook are now thriving thanks to the ratings and clicks that the Trump stories generated.
But Trump is an insufficient answer. The moral panic mainstreamed by the liberal news media had actually been underway for at least five years before Trump appeared on the scene. It began around 2011, the year the New York Times erected its online paywall. It was then that articles mentioning “racism,” “people of color,” “slavery,” or “oppression” started to appear with exponential frequency at the Times, BuzzFeed, Vox, the Washington Post, and NPR.
This “Great Awokening” has been impossible to miss if you consume mainstream news. But you don’t have to rely on your impressions. David Rozado, a computer scientist who teaches at New Zealand’s Otago Polytechnic, created a computer program that trawled the online archives of the Times from 1970 to 2018 to track the frequency with which certain words were used. What he found was that the frequency of words like “racism,” “white supremacy,” “KKK,” “traumatizing,” “marginalized,” “hate speech,” “intersectionality,” and “activism” had absolutely skyrocketed during that time.
His work echoes that of another academic, Zach Goldberg, a PhD candidate in political science at Georgia State University who found that in 2010, the term “white supremacy” was used fewer than 75 times in 2010 in the Washington Post and the New York Times, but over 700 times in 2020 alone; at NPR, it was used 2,400 times. The word “racism” appeared in the Washington Post over 4,000 times in 2020. That’s the equivalent of using it in 10 articles every single day.
What could explain the sudden market for this obsession with race and power?
The reason for this radical shift, despite the media’s fixation on race, has very little to do with it. It has everything to do with class.
Journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity, leaving in the dust anything commensurate to a similar concern with economic inequality.
The recent obsession with identity has allowed these journalists to pretend—indeed to believe—they are still speaking truth to power, still fighting on behalf of the little guy, even after they have themselves ascended to the ranks of the powerful, even when they are speaking down to an audience who, in more cases than not, have less than them on every measurable scale. It has quite simply been a displacement exercise; instead of experiencing economic guilt about rising inequality and their status among America’s elite, members of the news media—along with other highly educated liberals—have come to believe that the only inequality that matters is racial inequality; the only guilt that matters is white guilt, the kind you can do absolutely nothing to fix, given that it’s based on something as immutable as your skin color.
In other words, despite a no doubt well-intentioned desire to ameliorate racial inequality, their enthusiasm for the language of wokeness has allowed affluent white liberals to perpetuate and even excuse a deeply unequal economic status quo.
If journalists once fought the powerful on behalf of the powerless, in 21st century America, they are the powerful. While the average pay for a journalism job is quite low at around $40,000 a year, that’s because entry-level jobs pay so little; at the higher levels, journalists now make quite a bit more than the average American. More importantly, journalists now have social and cultural power, and they are overwhelming the children of economic elites. After all, to even be able to make it on $30,000 a year while living in the most expensive cities in America (the only ones left with a functioning journalism industry, thanks to the rise of the Internet and the collapse of local newspapers), you have to come from a family with enormous economic privilege who can help you out. Once a blue-collar trade, journalism has become something akin to an impenetrable caste. And what journalists have done with that power, perhaps inadvertently, is to wage a cultural battle that enhances their own economic interests against a less-educated and struggling American working class.
Once working-class warriors, the little guys taking on America’s powerful elites, journalists today are an American elite, a caste that has abandoned its working class roots as part of its meritocratic climb. And a moral panic around race has allowed them to mask this abandonment under the guise of “social justice.”
Take Kirsten Powers, one of Lemon’s guests on that panel in 2018. Powers had been the resident liberal at Fox News until CNN poached her in 2016, for a rumored $950,000 yearly salary.
But for Powers to traverse the ideological distance from Fox to CNN and take advantage of that nearly million-dollar salary, she had to undergo a woke metamorphosis. In 2015, while still employed by Fox, Powers had written a book called “The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.” But in the intervening years, she repented. “I was too dismissive of real concerns by traumatized people and groups who feel marginalized and ignored,” she wrote in a mea culpa in her USA Today column.
Newly reformed, Powers was able to take to CNN and join a panel to discuss how racist every white person in America is, especially anyone who voted for Trump (there was a bit of slippage between those two contradictory positions). That Lemon panel in 2018, typical in every way of our national news media, featured two television hosts with millions of dollars in the bank, who were convinced that white supremacy is alive and well in America.
“When people hear ‘privilege,’ they think that means I’m, like, a Richie Rich, and I’m living a rich life. That’s not what it means,” Powers patiently explained later in the CNN segment, without any apparent irony. “It just means you have a privilege that people of color don’t have.”
Why are affluent white liberals so eager to believe we’re living in a white-supremacist state, and that they are the beneficiaries of white supremacy? There are a number of explanations.
In his 2007 book “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,” Shelby Steele argues that the success of the civil rights movement resulted in a crisis of moral authority in white America when it recognized its collective role in the sin of racism. Writing in the 1990s, the historian Christopher Lasch argued that the Left had begun to portray the nation, the neighborhood, and even the commitment to a common standard as racist, as part of a larger attack on populism and abandonment of the working class.
More recently, in his book “Hate, Inc.,” Matt Taibbi explores how the media uses a fake notion of dissent to hide all the issues relevant to real Americans that it refuses to cover. “We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent,” writes Taibbi in a nod to Noam Chomsky’s famous work “Manufacturing Consent.” And we know that historically, at least since the Russian Revolution, the intelligentsia has gone to great lengths to portray its own economic interests and power hoarding in the guise of a noble cause that works on behalf of the powerless.
I think these are all pieces of the puzzle. But there’s another real reason that, however unconscious, is certainly also at play, and it’s this: Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals. I believe that many of them truly do wish to live in a more equitable society, but today’s liberal elites are also governed by a competing commitment: their belief in meritocracy, or the fiction that their status was earned by their intelligence and talents. Today’s meritocratic elites subscribe to the view that not only wealth but also political power should be the province of the highly educated. Still, liberals see themselves as compassionate and progressive. And perhaps unconsciously, they sought a way to reconcile the inequality that their meritocratic status produces with the compassionate emotions they feel toward the less fortunate. They needed a way to be perpetually on what they saw as the right side of history without having to disrupt what was right for them and their children.
A moral panic around race was the perfect solution: It took the guilt that they should have felt around their economic good fortune and political power— which they could have shared with the less fortunate had they cared to—and displaced it onto their whiteness, an immutable characteristic that they could do absolutely nothing to change.
This is how white liberals arrived at a situation where instead of agitating for a more equal society, they agitated for more diverse elites. Instead of asking why our elites have risen so far above the average American, they asked why the elites are so white. Instead of asking why working-class people of all races are so underrepresented in the halls of power, white liberals called the working class racist for voting for Trump. Instead of asking why New York City’s public school system is more segregated than Alabama’s, white liberals demanded diversity, equity, and inclusion training in their children’s exorbitantly priced prep schools.
In other words, wokeness provided the perfect ideology for affluent, liberal whites who didn’t truly want systemic change if it meant their children would have to sacrifice their own status, but who still wanted to feel like the heroes of a story about social justice, who still wanted to feel vastly superior to their conservative and even slightly less radical friends. They took a no doubt genuine abhorrence for the truly heinous ways black Americans have been treated historically—and, in some cases, continue to be treated—and instead of seeing in it a call to arms to create a genuinely equal society, they used it as an excuse to withdraw from the common good and the social contract, rebranding the problem of racism to fit the solution that would most benefit them. In the process, they demonized America itself, deplatforming the working class (of all races) while protecting their own status.
Racism is still a blight on American life. But wokeness is not how we heal; it has simply redefined the problem to the benefit of educated elites. By focusing on immutable characteristics like race, the woke moral panic has allowed economic elites to evade responsibility for their regressive view that elites should not only exist but rule. And in presenting race rather than class and income as America’s deep and worsening divide, the purveyors of wokeness have ended up comforting white, liberal elites, even as they have called them white supremacists.
It would have been impossible without the media. Once a tool to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, today American journalism comforts the comfortable, speaks power to truth, and insists on an orthodoxy that protects the interests of the elites in the language of a culture war whose burden is given to the working class to bear. In his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” Thomas Frank famously asked why white, working-class voters were voting against their own economic interests. But in 2016, when they voted in their own economic interests, those in the media called them racists.
The cost of erasing people who are economically working class from the conversation, the cost of concealing rather than exposing the class divide, has deepened and perpetuated inequality. This is plainly a disaster for anyone who truly cares about a more just society. And certainly for any nation that wishes to see itself as a democracy.
Reading Batya’s piece put me in mind of my conversation with Martin Gurri, whose own book, “The Revolt of the Public,” brilliantly explains our collapsing trust in the media and in so many other institutions in American life.
Finally:
Two NYT's Op Ed writers must have choked on this article:
Two NYT's Op Ed writers must have choked on this article:
Good morning. Republicans had a very good election night.
Glenn Youngkin after defeating Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times
Virginia goes red
Democrats had a rough election night. They lost the governor’s race in Virginia, a state Joe Biden won by 10 percentage points only a year ago. In New Jersey, which Biden won by 16 points, the governor’s election is too close to call.
So what do Democrats do now?
They have two basic options. The first is for congressional Democrats to try to distance themselves from Biden and drop his legislative agenda. The second is for the party to decide that its best chance at political recovery involves passing that agenda — which is still broadly popular, polls show.
It is hard to see how Democrats would benefit from the first option. But it’s not clear whether they remain unified enough to pull off the second.
Big Swings
Yesterday’s elections were certainly alarming for Democrats. Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican to win a top-of-the-ticket race in Virginia since 2009, beating Terry McAuliffe, 50.7 to 48.6 percent. Republicans also seem to be on track to win the lieutenant governor and state attorney general races, and to take control of the Virginia House of Delegates.
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, looks likely to pull off a close win. “Seems like almost all of the remaining vote batches will lean Democratic, in many cases pretty heavily,” Ryan Matsumoto of Inside Elections wrote. But the situation remains uncertain — and a close Democratic win in New Jersey is still surprising.
Why are voters so unhappy with Democrats? The main reason appears to be the pandemic, which has disrupted everyday life and the global economy for longer than many people expected.
Republican candidates have also focused voters on a set of social issues, like police funding and so-called identity politics, in which high-profile progressive positions are sometimes out of step with public opinion. As The Times’s Lisa Lerer wrote: “The crushing setbacks for Democrats in heavily suburban Virginia and New Jersey hinted at a conservative-stoked backlash to the changing mores around race and identity championed by the party.”
(In Minneapolis, the site of George Floyd’s murder, voters yesterday rejected a ballot measure that would have replaced the city’s police department with a Department of Public Safety.)
These developments — the pandemic, above all — have caused a sharp slide in Biden’s approval rating. “As Democrats try and make sense of the wreckage tonight, one fact stands out as one of the easiest explanations,” The Times’s Nate Cohn wrote. “Joe Biden has lower approval ratings at this stage of his presidency than nearly any president in the era of modern polling.”
Now to Capitol Hill
Of course, some level of dissatisfaction is typical for a president’s first two years in office. (The Virginia governor’s race often goes against a sitting president.) But it nonetheless confirms that Republicans are clear favorites to retake both the House and the Senate in next year’s midterm elections. In that scenario, Democrats would probably be unable to pass almost any significant legislation in 2023 and 2024.
With the elections over, the country’s political focus will return to Capitol Hill and the two big bills that make up the crux of Biden’s legislative agenda, one a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the other a Democratic bill that would help middle-class families and reduce pollution.
Together, the bills include a range of policies on which voters tend to support Democratic positions — like expanding Medicare, Medicaid, pre-K and federal programs to help create good-paying jobs.
But moderate Democrats have so far refused to pass the second bill. And progressive Democrats have refused to pass the infrastructure bill without more confidence that the bill focused on health care, education and the climate would pass. The infighting has contributed to voter frustration that Biden and the Democrats aren’t using their power to help American families.
Before the election, some Democrats warned that a defeat in Virginia could make it even harder for members of Congress to come together on the two bills. Yet it’s not clear what their alternative is. Failing to pass any major legislation would probably contribute to a perception that Democrats can’t be trusted to run Washington.
Congressional Democrats did seem to make progress yesterday, coming to an apparent agreement on a provision that would reduce prescription-drug prices. On the other hand, as The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty noted, parties that suffer disappointments like the Democrats’ last night “tend to waste a lot of time on recriminations, rather than sober reassessment.”
Whether the party collapses into more infighting — or manages to unify itself — is the biggest political question coming out of last night.
Moderate Democrats had a better night than progressives.
Eric Adams became New York’s mayor-elect, easily winning the general election after having relied on an anti-crime message to defeat more progressive candidates in the Democratic primary. In Buffalo, India Walton, a socialist running for mayor, appears to be trailing the incumbent, Byron Brown, a more moderate Democrat who lost in the primary but ran as a write-in candidate.
In the Seattle mayor’s race, Bruce Harrell, a Democrat who called for more police funding, is leading Lorena González, who endorsed cutting police budgets. And a law-and-order Republican, Ann Davison, is leading Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, a self-described police “abolitionist,” in the city attorney race.
Progressives did win some victories yesterday. Michelle Wu, a protégée of Senator Elizabeth Warren, will become the next mayor of Boston. Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Dearborn, Mich., elected progressive mayors as well. Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s progressive district attorney, easily won re-election against a Republican challenger.
And Tucson overwhelmingly passed a measure to lift the minimum wage to $15 an hour — another economic issue on which the progressive position is popular nationally not only with Democratic voters but with many moderate and Republican voters too.
Overall, though, progressives are struggling to turn their activist energy into many electoral victories. They have won some political offices in deep blue places, as they did again last night, but very few in swing districts or states.
More election results
New York City: Alvin Bragg will become Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, inheriting an investigation into the Trump family business. Shahana Hanif, of Brooklyn, is the first Muslim woman elected to the City Council.
Long Island: Raymond Tierney, a Republican, upset the incumbent Democrat for Suffolk County district attorney. The race in neighboring Nassau County remained too close to call.
Detroit: Mayor Mike Duggan won a third term, a sign that voters approve of his job leading the city out of bankruptcy and restoring basic services like streetlights.
Wisconsin: In a Milwaukee-area school board race, incumbents defeated a recall effort by conservative candidates who opposed teaching racial equity and diversity.
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No comment necessary:
In the Battle Between the Left and the Far Left, They’re Both Wrong
By LAWRENCE KUDLOW, Special to the Sun
So, day two of President Biden’s plea to his Democratic Party to pass key climate legislation in the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill to have his back at the United Nations climate summit at Glasgow, Scotland. The reconciliation bill has $550 billion for climate reforms, so-called, and the infrastructure bill I think is another couple hundred billion.
Senator Manchin got rid of the clean electricity plan, which is a blessing, but still, the whole idea that we’re going to shrink our energy power base by abolishing 80% of that fossil fuel base of oil, natural gas, and coal is ludicrous. And totally unnecessary. If we ever did it — which we won’t, but if we ever did — it would destroy the economy.
Make no mistake about that. Take a look at Britain when the North Sea winds stopped blowing. And Germany, which tried renewables and is now dependent on coal.
Or France, which backed away from its sensible nuclear power policy and instead went to gasoline taxes — to curb driving. All that led to was plunging polls for President Macron and hundreds of thousands of marchers on the Champs-Elysees every Sunday. Mr. Macron relented.
Small movements in global warming will not wreck our economy. Nor will wildfires, hurricanes, snowstorms, or other temporary, brief natural disasters. Here’s the point: The progressive left walked out on Joe Biden. As a distant observer, it looks to me like a big argument between the left and the far left.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight between the left and the far left. They are both wrong. Yes, I’ve been rooting for Senator Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema to cut dangerous spending and to block tax-hiking proposals. Every poll says voters and taxpayers believe more spending leads to higher inflation, and higher taxes lead to lost jobs.
Only the former chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, seems to think more spending generates lower inflation and more jobs. We are all certainly glad that when she was chief of the Fed she never opined on fiscal policy. Now she’s out of the closet, and it’s not good.
This new spending number that is circulating at $1.75 trillion is phony boloney. It’s larded with gimmicks and not credible. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial today called it a “jerry-rigged budget framework.” They are right.
Basically, the Democrats are scoring permanent programs as one-year temporaries. Like extending the child-care tax credit for a one-year cost of $110 billion, when in fact it’s a 10-year cost of well over $1 trillion. Ditto for expanding Obamacare subsidies. And expanded Medicare and Medicaid services.
The Journal puts the cost at $4 trillion. If the Democrats were to disclose their true intentions of a permanent and reckless expansion of the government welfare state, it would score far higher.
Meanwhile there are these late entry — or reentry — tax hike proposals, such as a corporate minimum tax for domestic and foreign company income, and higher marginal tax rates, such as a 5% surtax on income above $10 million and 8% above $25 million.
This, by the way, includes basically the backbone of American business, S-corps, LLCs, and wholly owned proprietorships that are the backbone of American business. This would be a huge discouragement for investment, capital formation, job creation, and higher wages.
In blue states like New York and California, the top marginal personal tax rate would come to around 60%, higher than Europe. I’m assuming the goofy billionaires wealth tax on unrealized capital gains has finally been laughed off the table. but who knows?
So I’m taking the Napoleonic position. I know he could be a megalomaniacal totalitarian, but even those people have occasional wisdom. Never, he’d say, interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.
So Joe Biden is going to Glasgow empty-handed. No tears from this source. You know what I’m going to say. Save America. Kill the bill.
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