Democrats and their allies in the media have been reacting badly to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announcing a possible independent run for the White House in 2020. Michael Knowles explains why on Wednesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show.” Transcript and video below.
The “Howard Schultz for President” campaign could not possibly be going better. Howard Schultz was on MSNBC, he’s discussing his independent bid for president — he’s been a lifelong Democrat but the Democrat Party has moved very far left and he could never win the Democrat primary today, so he’s running as an independent. This is a billionaire and already Democrats are throwing tomatoes at him, they don’t want him to run, they hate him — he’s a plutocrat, he’s a billionaire, he’s a straight white man. Here is how Howard Schultz responds:
Schultz: I’m not a Democrat, I don’t affiliate myself with the Democratic Party, whose so far left, who basically wants the government to take over a health care which we cannot afford. The government to give free college to everybody and the government to give everyone a job which basically is 40 trillion dollars on the balance sheet of 21 and a half trillion dollars, we can’t afford it. What can we do, what we need is comprehensive tax reform, what we need is sensible solutions to immigration, all of these things cannot happen under the current environment. Now I’ve also been criticized for being a billionaire, let’s talk about that. I’m self-made! I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, New York. I thought that was the American dream, the aspiration of America. You’re gonna criticize me for being successful?
Yes, yes. I’m not gonna criticize you for being successful, but the Democrats will criticize you for being successful because the Left gets everything backwards. We’ve talked about this for weeks now on the show, it’s become clearer every day. To a large portion of America, being a self-made billionaire is not the dream, for a large portion of America – to the Left – the American dream is to be the most aggrieved, it is to be the biggest victim, to check off all the victimhood boxes, that is the dream, that is what people are trying to do now. There are a lot of people who were born into immense privilege who pretend that they weren’t.
A great example of this is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She grew up in a nicer town than I did, she grew up right next door to where I did, a very affluent county, one of the richest in the country. She grew up there from the age of five all the way up through college. She attended a private college, according to her voting records she lived in ritzy Northern Westchester until just two years ago, and what does she do? She pretends she’s Jenny from the block. It’s not my phrase, she tweets it out she says, “I’m still I’m still Alex from the Bronx.” She’s pretending that she’s had a worse upbringing, a worse education, a more difficult aggrieved experience of life than she has because people are ashamed on the Left of success and privilege, and so they even flip humility and modesty.
Video and full transcript below:
The “Howard Schultz for President” campaign could not possibly be going better. Howard Schultz was on MSNBC, he’s discussing his independent bid for president — he’s been a lifelong Democrat but the Democrat Party has moved very far left and he could never win the Democrat primary today, so he’s running as an independent. This is a billionaire and already Democrats are throwing tomatoes at him, they don’t want him to run, they hate him – he’s a plutocrat, he’s a billionaire, he’s a straight white man. Here is how Howard Schultz responds:
Schultz: ” I’m not a Democrat, I don’t affiliate myself with the Democratic Party, whose so far left, who basically wants the government to take over a health care which we cannot afford. The government to give free college to everybody and the government to give everyone a job which basically is 40 trillion dollars on the balance sheet of 21 and a half trillion dollars, we can’t afford it. What can we do, what we need is comprehensive tax reform, what we need is sensible solutions to immigration, all of these things cannot happen under the current environment. Now I’ve also been criticized for being a billionaire, let’s talk about that. I’m self-made! I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, New York. I thought that was the American dream, the aspiration of America . You’re gonna criticize me for being successful?”
Yes, yes. I’m not gonna criticize you for being successful, but the Democrats will criticize you for being successful because the Left gets everything backwards. We’ve talked about this for weeks now on the show, it’s become clearer every day. To a large portion of America being a self-made billionaire is not the dream, for a large portion of America — to the Left — the American dream is to be the most aggrieved, it is to be the biggest victim, to check off all the victimhood boxes, that is the dream, that is what people are trying to do now. There are a lot of people who were born into immense privilege who pretend that they weren’t. A great example of this is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She grew up in a nicer town than I did, she grew up right next door to where I did, a very affluent county, one of the richest in the country. She grew up there from the age of five all the way up through college. She attended a private college, according to her voting records she lived in ritzy Northern Westchester until just two years ago, and what does she do? She pretends she’s Jenny from the block. It’s not my phrase, she tweets it out she says “I’m still I’m still Alex from the Bronx.” She’s pretending that she’s had a worse upbringing, a worse education, a more difficult aggrieved experience of life than she has because people are ashamed on the Left of success and privilege, and so they even flip humility and modesty.
True humility does away with false modesty, but what these people are is really prideful. They’re really prideful and they don’t want to admit the privileges that they’ve had, they don’t want to be thankful for it, they don’t want to aspire to even greater privileges, they want to flip it and they want to say “no no, I didn’t have any leg up in life. No no, I had it really hard, my mother washed more floors for less money than your mother did.” That’s what they all say, they’ve flipped success and victimhood, and victimhood today carries a cachet. This is why when you look around at college campuses there has been what’s called “the campus rape epidemic”. So many of the biggest of these stories, the most widely read — the UVA story, the gang rape story in Rolling Stone — so many of the high profile stories have proven to be hoaxes. The Duke Lacrosse one obviously, “Mattress Girl” at Columbia, on and on. We did a show about a month or two ago where we went through about a dozen of these.
Why is it that all these huge stories turn out to be hoaxes? Because victimhood carries a cachet. It carries a social currency, people want it, they think it makes them more virtuous, and this is our new vision of the world from the Left. This isn’t how the right views things, and this is creating a real division. It’s why Howard Schultz’s candidacy will probably hand the election to Donald Trump, so thank you Howard, but also it would be quite instructive to America because I do think there are people who are traditionally on the Left, or traditionally Democrats, who say “gosh they’re really getting everything backwards here, gosh I don’t want to live in a world where victimhood is something to aspire to maybe.” So his candidacy I think will show that fissure in the Democrat Party. The trouble for him is that the people who think that are just gonna vote for Trump, I don’t think that they’re gonna vote for Howard Schultz.