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In 1896, in his famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention, William Jennings Bryan said of those who considered the cities more important than the farms, “Burn down your cities, and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again, as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”
It is a sad commentary that far too many think that farm produce comes from the grocery store, not understanding that it comes from the hard work of American farmers. Such ignorance is understandable coming from a two-year-old, but it is shocking coming from a New York City billionaire, former New York City mayor, and Democratic presidential candidate.
Yet, that is what an old video from 2016, uncovered this week, reveals about presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg.
Speaking to the “Distinguished Speakers Series” at the University of Oxford Business School in 2016, Bloomberg responded to a question about the possibility of uniting people in the middle part of the country with the people on the coasts. In recent years, it has become increasingly obvious that many self-appointed elitists in places such as New York City and San Francisco consider places such as Kansas and Nebraska, where America’s vast farmlands are, to be “fly-over country.”
Bloomberg said that the problem was that many blue-collar workers are just not able to adapt to the information economy — even if they are educated to do so.
“The agrarian society lasted 3,000 years,” Bloomberg said, “and we could teach processes. I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”
Of course, there is a whole lot more to modern farming than that, as evidenced by the large number of agricultural colleges across the country, such as Texas A & M, Iowa State, and Oklahoma State. There, students learn scientific farming methods, and researchers are constantly searching for ways to increase crop yields in order to feed people in places such as, well, Bloomberg’s New York City.
But Bloomberg did not stop with his condescending remarks about farmers — he also spoke in a derogatory manner about factory workers. “Then we had 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture, now it’s two percent in the United States.”
Instead of farming and factory work, Bloomberg sees the future in the “information economy,” arguing that the “information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that’s a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter.” In other words, the farmers and the factory workers just are not all that smart.
What is to be done, then? According to Bloomberg, “It’s not clear the teachers can teach or the students can learn, and so the challenge of society of finding jobs for these people who can take care of giving them a roof over their head and a meal in their stomach and a cell phone and a car and that sort of thing. But the thing that is the most important, that will stop them from setting up a guillotine someday, is the dignity of a job.”
In other words, either give these people with less gray matter a decent paying job, or they are going to be bringing out the guillotines, apparently for elitists like Michael Bloomberg.
Stu Loeser of the Bloomberg campaign has accused the Trump campaign of taking the comments out of context, but Bloomberg also faced a negative reaction from “People for Bernie,” an organization which is promoting the campaign of socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “Time and again we see Bloomberg insulting the middle class and the working class, union members and not yet union members. Maybe it’s time for pundits to stop pretending he’s just another candidate. Bloomberg is an oligarch spending his play money to buy the White House.”
The truth is that Bloomberg is not alone in expressing disdain for the middle class and working class — many of whom supported President Donald Trump in the last presidential election, and millions of whom are backing him now. Other Democrats, such as Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, dismissed half of Trump’s voters as a “basket of deplorables.” Former President Barack Obama once said that these same people were those who were clinging to their guns and their Bibles. Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada once complained about the smell of such people touring the U.S. Capitol.
Representative Fred Keller (R-Pa.), who represents a congressional district with more than 10,000 farms, condemned Bloomberg’s remarks on Monday morning: “I bet Mike Bloomberg could not even change a tire on his car, let alone deal with the myriad of issues farmers deal with on a daily basis. Bloomberg’s comments about the intelligence of farmers are ignorant, derogatory, and small-minded.”
Fox News’ Britt Hume joked that Bloomberg must have learned what he knows about farming from watching “Hee Haw.”
Image: Scharfsinn86 via iStock / Getty Images Plus
Steve Byas is a university history and government instructor and the author of History’s Greatest Libels. He may be contacted at [email protected].
