Frustrated over Democrat Senator Joe Manchin’s decision not to support President Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation, Hollywood’s Bette Midler attacked the entire state of West Virginia from which Manchin hails. In a Monday tweet, the 76-year-old singer and actress asserted that the people of the Mountain State are all “poor, illiterate and strung out.”
Midler accused Manchin of selling out the people of the United States over his Sunday announcement on Fox News that he could not support the multi- trillion-dollar “Build Back Better” bill, which would radically alter the U.S. economy.
“What #JoeManchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like his state, is horrible,” Midler wrote. “He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.”
Manchin, of course, is a politician who is used to taking rhetorical arrows for his policy decisions. But the people of West Virginia — a coal mining state, which will be severely affected by Biden’s Build Back Better bill — oughtn’t be attacked in this manner, even by a vacuous, has-been actor.
Midler later apologized — sort of — for her outburst against West Virginians. In that “apology” the actress referred to Manchin’s family as a “criminal enterprise” and asked if Manchin was “really the best WV has to offer its own citizens?”
“I apologize to the good people of WVA for my last outburst. I’m just seeing red; #JoeManchin and his whole family are a criminal enterprise. Is he really the best WV has to offer its own citizens? Surely there’s someone there who has the state’s interests at heart, not his own!,” Midler wrote.
Midler’s “apology” was not well received in much of the Twitterverse. Chairman of the Georgia GOP David Shafer pointed out that the people of the Mountain State aren’t really all that illiterate and that some of that “poorness” Midler is talking about is Democrat induced.
“West Virginia has a higher literacy rate than New York, California or New Jersey and would like likely have fewer poor people had the Democrats not demolished the mining industry,” Shafer wrote.
Twitter user Kat Mon observed the obvious bigotry in Midler’s original statement — bigotry that, it should be noted, Midler never actually apologized for.
“I was educated abroad and had flat mates from West Virginia,” Kat Mon wrote. “One works as a physician and the other is [a] software engineer. I get the difference of opinions, but it’s hard to stomach a comment that appears to attack a category of human beings.”
Conservative comedians the Hodge Twins were more blunt in their assessment of Midler.
“You suck as a person,” the twins wrote to the “Divine Miss M.”
The Hollywood establishment, whose ideology Midler represents quite well, never passes up an opportunity to preach about tolerance in their various self-congratulatory award shows or in their movies and television offerings. The industry is full of vicious left-wing zealots such as Midler who signal their own virtue about the godless LGBTQ agenda, the fake “crisis” of man-made climate change, and any other cause célèbre that appeals to their un-American sensibilities.
Unfortunately, in the entertainment industry, tolerance is a one-way street that ends the moment one disagrees with their monolithic view of the world.
Midler slipped up. She accidentally tweeted to the world what she and her entertainment establishment cronies truly think about the people who support their work. And although she claimed to apologize, she actually didn’t.
It’s unfortunate for Midler because she could use the support of West Virginians in the upcoming weeks as she has a new movie coming out early next year — Hocus Pocus 2. Sounds like a good film to ignore.
