Left privilege: Hanson addressees the hate on CNN screens worldwide

by WorldTribune Staff, January 18, 2019

It is repeated daily in newspapers and on websites, regurgitated by cable news leftist talking heads 24/7 and played non-stop on public screens paid for by CNN at airports, McDonald’s and elsewhere. Elite progressives in the media, politics and entertainment savaging President Donald Trump and the 63 million “deplorables and irredeemables” who voted for him.

Cultural progressives have granted themselves a “license to hate,” columnist and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson wrote on Jan. 16.

Hanson cited several examples from the Left’s spectrum of hate:

  • On CNN, former Republican politico and now Never Trump cable new analyst Rick Wilson characterized the president’s supporters as his “credulous rube ten-toothed base.”
  • Politico reporter Marco Caputo had tweeted of the crowd he saw at a Trump rally: “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.” When challenged, Caputo doubled down on his invective. He snarled, “Oh no! I made fun of garbage people jeering at another person as they falsely accused him of lying and flipped him off. Someone fetch a fainting couch.”
  • In the released trove of the Department of Justice text communications involving the Clinton email probe, an unidentified FBI employee had texted to another FBI attorney his abject contempt for the proverbial Trump voter and indeed middle America itself: “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS [“pieces of sh*t”].” In fact, Trump in 2016 received about 90 percent of all Republican votes, about the same ratio as won by both recent presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.
  • In the now notorious text communications between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, fired FBI operatives on Robert Mueller’s special counsel team, Strzok right before the 2016 election had texted his paramour Page: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”
  • Recently actor Jim Carey tweeted a picture of Trump supporters as apes, as if evolution is now operating in reverse as Trumpians descend into primate status.
  • Rep. Hank Johnson, Georgia Democrat, (who on prior occasions had referred to Jewish residents on the West Bank as “termites,” and believed that too many American troops based on the shoreline of Guam might “tip” the island over and capsize it) recently compared Trump to Hitler, and characterized Trump’s supporters – which included 90 percent of the Republican Party – as “older, less educated, less prosperous, and they are dying early. Their lifespans are decreasing, and many are dying from alcoholism, drug overdoses, liver disease, or simply a broken heart caused by economic despair.”
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden said Trump supporters are “virulent people” and “the dregs of society.”

“Note the force of such dehumanizing invective that transcends political differences,” Hanson wrote. “Trump voters were not just mistaken in their political allegiances. Instead they looked like toothless zombies and stunk up stores, and are not quite human, and are destined to die off. And all this from supposedly progressive humanists, quick to demonize others who would mimic their venom.”

Then there is “multimillionaire TV personality Donny Duetsch,” who Hanson noted “weighed in on television about the Trump supporters who favor building a barrier on the southern border to discourage illegal immigration.”

Duetsch said: “This is all [Trump] has left. That one metaphor, that one thing that talks to that 39, 40, 41% base that says: either the black man, or the brown man, or the Jewish man, or the media man, or the banker man is coming to take your wife?”

Hanson wrote: “According to Duetsch’s analysis, were the legions of Democrats – including Sens. Biden and Chuck Schumer – who supported the Secure Fence Act of 2006 that authorized hundreds of miles of border fencing, also worried over their virility or is just the working middle class?”

Both Wilson and Deutsch “in the past had also characterized Trump supporters as Nazi-like,” Hanson wrote. “Both, in lieu of any analyses of why or how Trump got elected or has found success in restoring the economy to robust growth, resorted to crude stereotypes of a constituency in a fashion they knew would be exempt from criticisms of bias and crude stereotyping. Similarly, for historian Jon Meacham and Rep. Stephen Cohen (Tennessee Republican), Trump’s audience and appeal are similar to those of the Ku Klux Klan’s of the 1920s.”

Hanson continued: “The New York Times takes loud pride in its adamant opposition to hatred and racial, class, and gender bias – at least in theory. That is why it both hired and understandably fired in the same day tech writer Quinn Norton, once it discovered that she had remained friends with notorious Alt-right racist Andrew Auernheimer, despite claims of frequently disassociating herself from his repugnant views.

“Yet the Times hired and kept another tech writer on its editorial board, the racist Harvard Law School grad Sarah Jeong. She had not just befriended a racist, but was an abject hater herself – at least if her Twitter trove can be believed. But the difference was twofold, Jeong was Asian-American, and the objects of her hatred were purportedly old and white. And she apparently knew well that such a formula provided her exemption from any criticism for expressing toxicity.”



All of these outbursts were “voiced from highly educated elites (Caputo has a journalism degree from the University of Miami, Deutsch graduated from the Wharton School, Jeong from Harvard Law School, Strzok received a master’s degree from Georgetown, Wilson attended George Washington University),” Hanson wrote. “And all engaged in vicious and cowardly stereotyping of a demographic in a manner that they assumed involved no downside. Rather, the smears were delivered on the expectation of winning approbation from their peers. And they did in Twitter-fueled competitions to find the crudest pejoratives.”

The hatred was not “confined to the media and politicos, but rather also came from the very top of the Democratic Party,” Hanson noted. “After the election, a defeated Hillary Clinton openly doubled-down on her earlier smear of Trump’s base as deplorables and irredeemables, in recalibrating Barack Obama’s old saw of the white working class as ‘clingers’ who had failed to appreciate his transformative candidacy.”

Clinton told an audience in Mumbai, India: “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.”

Hanson wrote: “What is again odd about these examples of open progressive racist, cultural, and class contempt for the American interior, is not just how ubiquitously politicians and journalists voiced them, but also how candidly and indeed confidently they repeated notions of smelly, toothless, ape-like, lazy ‘garbage people.’ In that sense, who hated Trump and what he represented also explains precisely why so many went to the polls to elect him, and perhaps also why Trump’s own uncouthness was in its own manner contextualized by his supporters as a long overdue pushback to the elite disdain and indeed hatred shown them.”

Hanson continued: “What does all this hate speech signify?

“One, there is terrible frustration among both the progressive Left (and the Never Trump Right whose luminaries have mused about replacing a supposed spent white working class with purportedly more energetic immigrants). So far Trump has not been stopped. His foreign and domestic agendas often find success and resonate with about 40-45 percent of the American people. Much of the uncouthness, then, reflects their own frustrations and sense of alienation that millions of Americans have tuned them out.

“Second, most of the slurs are voiced by elites, especially politicos, journalists, and celebrities. Perhaps their angst is driven by class—as in how can their own superior logic and reasoning fail to resonate with 63 million voters? Answer: Trump voters are hopelessly obtuse to the point that they cannot even take care of their own personal hygiene or are now descending into simian status.

“Third, cowardice plays a role. Those who slander the deplorables and irredeemables assume that they can say almost anything and expect no pushback, given the white working classes lack the romance of the poor and the supposed panache of the elite. A race to the bottom develops in which the more the hatred, the more the clicks and the media exposure. Minority critics expect their own identity politics affiliations to shield them from criticism. Wealthy white elites virtue-signal their disgust for those without privilege as a way of ensuring that those like themselves, who most certainly enjoy privilege, are rewarded with ideological exemptions for it.”

Hanson concluded: “Finally we are learning that the entire idea of political correctness was never much about universal ideas of tolerance of the other, or insistence that language and protocols must not stigmatize individuals by lumping them into stereotyped and dehumanized collective groups. What we are witnessing, instead, is that it is fine to demonize millions, from their appearance to their purported hygiene and smell to affinities with feces and apes – if it serves political or cultural agendas.

“In sum, cultural progressivism is about raw power, not principle.”


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