CUT TO: White House Communications meeting.
Jen Psaki
Guys this is serious. We need to get more conservatives to take the vaccine. We
need to identify them and target our messaging to them. Kate, you said you once
stopped for gas in Chattanooga. You must have seen conservatives in their natural
element. What are they like?
Kate Bedingfield
They are highly unintelligent. Though most appear to be human their eyes are vacant.
The few high-functioning ones manage to eke out thoughts here and there. Racist thoughts, obviously. They enjoy drinking beer and fishing and listening to songs about drinking beer and fishing. And…..
Jen Psaki
Yes, Kate, and?
Kate Bedingfield
None of them owns a Canada Goose jacket.
And so Operation White Trash was born.
With a straight face, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told the gathered press that the Biden administration was going to spend a few billion dollars to convince people in high-risk communities to get vaccinated.
“Often, people think of that as just Black and brown communities,” she explained. But, “that is also conservative communities, white evangelicals.”
She was just getting started.
“You know, an example is Dr. Collins participated in The 700 Club.”
”We’ve run PSAs on The Deadliest Catch. We’re engaged with NASCAR and Country Music TV.”
“We’re looking for a range of creative ways to get directly connected to white conservative communities,” to “meet people where they are.”
Okay, where do we start.
First, Psaki identifies a few races from the get go: “Black and brown communities,” and “conservative communities.” So “conservative” means white.
But that is a pretty faulty foundation because a Pew report in January 2019 revealed that, “43% of black Democrats called themselves moderate, 29% called themselves liberal and 25% called themselves conservative.”
So that’s rubbish but let’s focus on the good stuff.
The 700 Club?
Where the hell do you find the 700 Club? Is that two UHF channels down from the Lawrence Welk Show?
It’s easy to imagine the White House strategy session:
Jen Psaki
What do the old conservative whites watch to celebrate their God?
Kate Bedingfield
Leni Riefenstahl movies?
Jen Psaki
True, Kate but we need something newer. They watch color TV now.
Surely they’ll capture the remaining young, spritely, moronic hayseeds in their PSA net by blanketing their condescending messaging on The Deadliest Catch, NASCAR and Country Music TV.
Remarkable that the left is so self assured in their composite of the American conservative that they cannot fathom them watching anything that isn’t a car going “vroom!” men in boats or white musicians singing about trucks.
Why not run PSA’s on Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard reruns, too?
In fact the administration could incentivize conservative idiots to get the vaccine by rewarding them with Bud Light and moonshine, Skoal Bandits, Winston cigarettes, night crawlers, pickled eggs and pork rinds.
After all, noodling for catfish in a Louisiana swamp is “where they are,” according to Jen Psaki.
Again and again they proudly proclaim to know precisely what is in the mind of a conservative. They’ve created a stereotypical image in their heads and they have no, NONE, no inkling that they could possibly be wrong.
These are all straw men, but no matter, they’ll do their activism around vapor if that’s what it takes to justify the activism.
In January of 2017, just before Donald Trump’s inauguration, a group of activists had an ingenious idea: Throw a gay dance party outside of Mike Pence’s house:
Obviously, with all the same-sex dancing and celebrating and kissing happening Pence wouldn’t be able to bear it, and would surely instantaneously combust, so filled with gaseous homophobic hate as he was.
So they danced and twerked and acted out in various ways and, Pence didn’t care.
If he was the intolerant, maniacal guy they had envisioned, maybe he would, but he wasn’t so he didn’t.
But they were sure they could read that man’s mind as well as the millions of people who supported him.
For the last four years the brightest of the bright, the academic elite, told us why Trump happened. They could read the minds of conservatives.
“For the first time since Europeans arrived in this country,” Mutz notes, “white Americans are being told that they will soon be a minority race.” When members of a historically dominant group feel threatened, she explains, they go through some interesting psychological twists and turns to make themselves feel okay again. First, they get nostalgic and try to protect the status quo however they can. They defend their own group (“all lives matter”), they start behaving in more traditional ways, and they start to feel more negatively toward other groups.
Maybe, Professor, maybe they were sick of beltway politicians - the same ones who had delivered the laws, foreign policy, and trade deals that had upended their lives.
We know YOUR life never changes for the worse when you’re tenured and living off the beltway teat, but out in America life can get tough when the manufacturing and energy jobs vanish. It’s the kind of life unknown to those who carry $25 dollar four-packs of craft beer into their San Francisco lofts.
After the 2016 election CNN dispatched crews into middle America to prove what they already knew: Trump won because of racism. W. Kamau Bell hosted show called United Shades of America. With the exception of CNN’s publicity campaign for Richard Spencer and Bell’s meeting with the International Imperial Wizard of the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, they never seemed to find any racists.
At least credit Bell for talking to people.
Thankfully, a few in the media have also found benefits to having conversations with politically and culturally diverse groups of people.
Back in the 1990’s, Glenn Greenwald, a far-left reporter, had a breakthrough while trolling conservatives in an online forum, as he recalled in Buzzfeed.
"We'd go in there to torment the conservatives," he recalled. "But the more I started doing it, the more I got drawn into the conversations. I stayed there for two years and made friends with all these people ... I argued with them, debated with them. I was totally openly gay, and they were very accepting. It was an eye-opening experience, and it taught me not to make assumptions about who people are."
Amen.
Michael Moynihan is a reporter for Vice News and a host of the excellent podcast, The Fifth Column. He is no Trump fan but has repeatedly talked about the decency of the Trump voters he has met - totally counter to the narrative, especially on the coasts. In 2019 Moynihan went to a Trump-friendly bar in the Bay Ridge neighborhood in New York and drank as well as talked to the patrons for hours.
One Trump supporter told him he also liked Pete Buttigieg, One was an Andrew Yang fan and another wanted to see Michelle Obama become president someday.
Sure, the left will call these people anecdotes and discard them in favor of their imagined version of Republicans, but they are fools.
This country is full of millions and millions of anecdotes and as unpleasant a thing it is for a lazy person to define or understand anything non binary, their refusal to do so fosters distrust and disdain from coast to coast.
Also, maybe just don’t be a jerk. Lighten up. Have a cold Budweiser and a delicious pickled egg.