A lot of the discussion you’ll hear about “identity politics” focuses on how immoral and destructive it is, and for good reason. Judging people on the basis of characteristics they can’t control is wrong.
Decent people understand that. But a lesser-known side effect of identity politics is that it leaves the people who believe in it — the daytime anchors of MSNBC, for example — completely bewildered by major political events. Identity politics makes its adherents significantly dumber; there’s no other way to put it.
Take the election of Donald Trump in 2016, for example. This was eight years ago, and by now, most of us have a pretty good idea why it happened. Trump, unlike Hillary Clinton, did not tell coal miners that he was going to put them out of business. He didn’t describe half the country as “deplorable,” or extol the virtues of free trade in towns where all the good jobs have moved overseas. Instead, Trump’s message — not his skin color, or his gender, or any other aspect of his identity — resonated with tens of millions of Americans. Whether you disagree with his message or not, that should be obvious.
But somehow, it’s not obvious to MSNBC. As of this week, in the year 2024, they’re still very much unsure why Donald Trump won in 2016, and why he’s leading in every presidential poll today. Watch:
The premise of this intro is that, by default, you’d expect Joe Biden to be dominating the vote among white rural voters, because unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden’s dad was a used-car salesman and his family was middle-class growing up. This is how MSNBC anchors (and their viewers) see the world. They vote on the basis of identity — that is, characteristics that candidates can’t control. And because the essence of modern liberalism is projection, they think everyone else must vote the same way, too.
It doesn’t matter to them that Biden devoted his entire professional life to representing the interests of banks and credit card issuers in the Senate, to the point that a bank hired Biden’s son just as Biden was pushing major legislation that would benefit the same bank. They don’t care that Biden somehow owns multiple mansions despite the fact he’s supposedly been earning a politician’s salary his whole life. They don’t even care about anything that Trump campaigned on, or delivered in office. All that they can process is the respective “identities” of the two candidates, which were determined at birth.
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The problem with this level of ignorance is that a critical mass of Americans now subscribe to it. So at this point, one of two options is possible. Either the Left can renounce identity politics and start debating ideas or they can double down on identity politics, which inevitably means declaring war against the identities they see as the enemy.
As this MSNBC segment went on, it became very clear which option they’re going with. Mika Brzezinski introduces two authors who just wrote a book entitled, “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.” Watch as the authors describe the supposed threat that “white rural voters” pose:
I need to stop it there to make a few points. First of all, it needs to be said that when they use the term “white rural voters,” they really just mean “white poor voters.” Throughout the book, these white rural voters are described as being “beleaguered,” having “stagnant incomes,” and high rates of “poverty, unemployment, [and] homelessness.” They just as easily could have titled their book “White Poor Rage,” if they wanted to. That’s pretty obvious, but it’s notable that they still feel the need to cloak their elitism in euphemism.
Presumably they realize that, if they started complaining about the behavior of poor white people, then it would be pretty easy to point to the behavior of poor black people in this country — which doesn’t compare particularly well by any objective metric, including (most notably) rates of violent crime. In fact, both poor black males and wealthy black males have a greater chance of committing a felony in their lifetimes than white males of any income level. These are the kind of comparisons you can avoid when you use euphemisms like “poor rural Americans” instead of “poor white Americans.” You also have some plausible deniability when people accuse you of being an elitist snob who finds lower income people repugnant. It’s not lower income people you’re mad at, after all. It’s just those pesky rural whites.
But let’s put the euphemism aside for a second and get into the substance of what you just heard. According to the authors of this book — which is really more like an anti-white screed:
We show 30 polls and national studies, and we provide the receipts in Chapter 6.
Supposedly these “receipts” — because everyone talks like they’re posting on Twitter now — clearly demonstrate that white rural voters are a threat to the country. According to the authors:
They’re the most conspiracist group — QAnon supporters and subscribers, COVID denialism.
Well, that sounds pretty bad. But what exactly is “QAnon support” and “COVID denialism?” Those terms are never defined in that interview. So I got a copy of the book and looked through it. Somewhere in Chapter 6, I found this:
85 percent of … ‘QAnon believers’ say the COVID-19 virus was human-made in a foreign lab. … [and] QAnon believers are one and a half times more likely to live in rural than in urban areas.
Did you catch that? In other words, these white poor voters are supposedly nuts, because they believe in the crazy QAnon theory that COVID was made in a foreign lab. In case you’re keeping track, this happens to be the same unhinged QAnon conspiracy theory that the FBI Director has publicly stated is likely to be true. More importantly, it’s the same theory that any reasonable person would concede is very plausible, at a minimum.
We’ve all listened as the virologists on Tony Fauci’s payroll changed their stories about the origins of COVID. We’ve seen the warnings before the pandemic about the lax security at the Wuhan lab, we’ve followed the funding going from the NIH to Wuhan for gain-of-function experiments, and we’ve all noticed that the outbreak began practically down the street from the Wuhan lab. Noticing these facts does not make you a “threat to democracy,” even if you happen to be white, or poor, or live out in the country. And you get a sense that the authors of this book know that, because in this interview, they’re very careful to avoid specifying the details of the “conspiracy theories” that they’re complaining about. Instead, they call it “COVID denialism,” and they hope you won’t check.
Along the same lines, the authors claim it’s a lunatic QAnon conspiracy theory to suggest that global elites are “pedophiles” who participate in a sex-trafficking operation, which is probably convincing if you haven’t heard the name “Jeffrey Epstein” at any point in the past decade. And of course, there’s also the implication in this book that anyone who believes the 2020 election wasn’t completely on the up-and-up — anyone who has any issue with mail-in ballots, or ballot harvesting, or Biden getting 10 million more votes than Barack Obama by campaigning from his basement — must be a lunatic. These are the “conspiracy theories” and “threats to democracy” that these authors are referencing in this segment.
As unbelievable as all of this is, it gets worse. Here’s the rest of the MSNBC interview:
He can barely contain himself. He’s practically frothing at the mouth to accuse poor white people of doing exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing for the last several years. It’s astonishing to watch.
He claims that it’s poor white voters who are the enemies of the freedom of speech — as if every power center in the Biden administration hasn’t united to destroy Elon Musk for committing the crime of allowing people to talk on the Internet, as if every major university in this country won’t punish students for stating out loud that they believe in biological reality, as if affirming the basic truth that “all lives matter” won’t get you fired from every major corporation on the planet right now. No, it’s the poor white voters who are at war with the independent press and the freedom of speech. That’s what MSNBC would have you believe. The fact they can say it with a straight face is the most revealing part. That’s how committed they are to this fantasy.
The whole answer you just saw was one absurdity after another. It’s poor white voters, we’re told, who supposedly want the president to act “unilaterally” and “without any checks from Congress” or the all-important, unelected “bureaucracy” in Washington, claim the authors.
This might be a compelling argument if you weren’t alive to see Barack Obama in the Rose Garden, announcing a unilateral amnesty for millions of illegal aliens in an election year.
This might be a compelling argument if you were literally born yesterday, and therefore didn’t notice when Biden decided to ignore the Supreme Court, and nationalize this country’s rental properties and “forgive” billions of dollars in student loan debt, meaning offload it to taxpayers.
This might be a compelling argument if you somehow missed the bombs that every administration in modern history has dropped without bothering to consult with Congress, much less seek their approval.
They’re lying, to your face, again and again. And they’re doing it for a reason. It’s the same reason that the authors claim it’s poor white people who “excuse or justify violence as alternative to peaceful public discourse.” To believe this, you would have had to miss the torching of churches, police stations, and small businesses during the George Floyd riots. You’d have to ignore the fact that, as people were being murdered in the name of “civil rights,” Kamala Harris was raising bail money for violent thugs. You’d have to focus, entirely, on January 6th, as the singular act of so-called political violence in the past decade, even though it’s the one act of “political violence” in which only one person was killed — and it was a protester. You would have to subscribe, without reservation, to an alternate reality — all in the name of demonizing white, poor, predominantly Christian voters who don’t want to support Joe Biden, that humble child born into a middle-class family who turned out to be as corrupt a politician as Delaware has ever seen — which, if you know Delaware, is saying something.
There’s one more clip from this interview I want to show you because it underscores how little these people care about poor white people — even when they’re dying by the tens of thousands. Watch:
It’s an incredible statement. Basically, it amounts to this: “If you discount the fact that poor white people are killing themselves far more often than any other demographic group, and if you ignore the fact that they’re overdosing on fentanyl far more than any other demographic group — basically if you ignore the two leading causes of death among young people — then, poor white people have it pretty good.” That’s what he just said.
This is the level of visceral disdain that the corporate press and the mainstream Left have for white Americans. The point of going through all of this is not to rip apart the dumb arguments in some stupid book. The point is to ask — why exactly did the authors go to these lengths to lie about a very specific racial demographic? And why did one of the biggest media conglomerates on the planet decide to promote their lies, and overt racial disdain?
The truth is that, in spite of the euphemisms about “rural whites” that these authors use, they’re actually being very direct in their dehumanization and villainization of a class they see as undesirable. Corporate media has always hated poor whites, of course, but now they’re (almost) coming out and saying it. This MSNBC segment is as clear a declaration as we’ve ever seen — clearer even than Barack Obama’s demonization of Pennsylvania voters clinging to guns and religion, clearer than Hillary Clinton’s complaints about “deplorables” — that the Left now stands for the unabashed hatred of poor white Americans, who already have been stripped of status, who have been discriminated against at every turn, and who have lost their economic security at the altar of globalization.
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And you know that’s true, because no publisher would ever sell a book titled “Black ghetto rage” or something similar. Instead of addressing that topic, they’re more likely to excuse black crime and violence as a symptom of “late stage capitalism.” In fact, that’s precisely what the Washington Post just did. They published this image of the CVS in Columbia Heights of Washington, D.C.:
Empty shelves in the Columbia Heights CVS, as seen in January. (Michael Reynolds/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Here’s how the story begins:
There is almost nothing left to steal at the CVS in Columbia Heights, and that gives you an idea of which items have actual value. … Blank CDs, for example — the thieves don’t even bother with them. The greeting card section has been left alone. … Everything else that remains in the store in Northwest D.C., which is not much, is under plexiglass … It has been like this since at least October, when the Legend of the Empty CVS of Washington began to spread beyond the District’s borders. It became a horror story of Late Capitalism.
So, when poor white people point out that COVID came from a lab, they’re the enemies of democracy. When poor black people steal so much from a local CVS that toothpaste has to go behind plexiglass, the issue is “late capitalism.” Where this leads is racial resentment and ultimately racial violence. For all their projection, that’s what they want.
They’re not really afraid of poor white voters. They’re afraid that, in less than a year, for the first time in several years, someone in power might actually care about what all these poor white people have to say.