BRYAN PRESTON: LA Times Editor Has a Real Problem With Her Nice, Helpful Trump-Supporting Neighbors.
“Trumpites.” “Q fans.” They support blue lives (meaning, the police)! Why, that only describes 80 percent of the country! And she finishes the section with a racial flourish because the mainstream media and the left are literally obsessed with race. The author could have a side hustle writing unfunny political jokes for Samantha Bee.
The author of the above is Virginia Heffernan. She’s an opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times. She’s also protected her tweets, probably thanks to the due backlash this article has generated. Heffernan also hosts this, which is surely as pure and unbiased as the driven snow her nice neighbors plowed for her.
Should — can — this person fairly cover the news? Take a look at this.
Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon, also gives things away for free. The favors Hezbollah does for people in the cities Tyre and Sidon probably don’t involve snowplows, but, like other mafias, Hezbollah tends to its own — the Shiite sick, elderly and hungry. They offer protection and hospitality and win loyalty that way. And they also demand devotion to their brutal, us-versus-them anti-Sunni cause. Some of us are family, the favors say; the rest are infidels.
This is deeply, almost insanely, unfair to about half the country. It’s certainly unfair to her neighbors, who we can presume support Israel against Hezbollah and have literally nothing in common with the terrorists. Just who is creating an “us-versus-them” here? The nice neighbor who helps out plowing the snow without checking your politics first, or the snooty writer who compares that person to a violent terrorist army backed by the totalitarian mullahs in Tehran? Which person in this is dehumanizing and othering someone?
Which one thought it was a smart take to go public with the virtue signaling?
This op-ed just may reveal the extent to which those who run the mainstream media hate the rest of us. They don’t merely oppose Trump supporters’ politics.
It’s hatred. Heffernan doesn’t view her neighbors as fellow countrymen.
Related: Marcy Kaptur’s warning:
Kaptur is the longest-serving woman in the current Congress.
She has also been in the U.S. House of Representatives longer than any woman has served there, in all of U.S. history.
She came to the Congress in 1983.
She is 74 and has been a Democrat her entire voting life.
You might think she is worth listening to.
As it happens, she has a message for her party: Wake up.
Wake up or you will lose the House in the next election and maybe not regain it for many years.
Wake up or you will lose the working class to the Republicans, for good.
It is already happening.
Ms. Kaptur points out that leadership in the House is dominated by members from the two coasts and from wealthy districts.
A political realignment is taking place. Rural America is already Republican and, more specifically, Trumpian. Now more and more working-class and working-poor Americans are leaving the Democratic Party and voting Republican. Why? Because they feel their plight, their reality, has at least been recognized by Donald Trump’s GOP.
Mind you, Ms. Kaptur thinks Donald Trump did nothing for these voters, and never seriously intended to. She also thinks he is psychologically “unbalanced.” But she recognizes what he recognized: what has happened to manufacturing and the working class in places like Toledo, Lorain, Lordstown and Youngstown, Wheeling, the Mon Valley, as well as parts of Greater Cleveland, and Buffalo, and large swaths of Greater Detroit.
This being the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, there’s nothing in there to indicate the role that Democratic Party operatives with bylines have played in making the working class feel unrecognized by smug leftists such as Heffernan. Not to mention the chilling effect of the language police at the New York Times, CNN’s doxx squad, and other elite media institutions.
(Incidentally, it’s fascinating that the media aren’t going with the usual “We are All Socialists Now,” “Forty Years of Democratic Party rule,” “The Death of Conservatism”-style headlines, unlike after Mr. Obama’s victory in 2008. As Glenn wrote in November, “For a guy who supposedly lost, Trump sure had a lot of coattails. And for a guy who supposedly won, Biden sure didn’t.”)