OPINION:
Much ado has been made over Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s condescending comments about farmers — you know, the ones where he said in 2016 that he “could teach anybody” to “dig a hole,” drop in a seed, cover with dirt, “add water” and voila, “up comes the corn.”
But really, this is how all Democrats think of conservatives, the voting block that makes up the bulk of the base of which he was referring.
Democrats quite genuinely believe that a Republican is simply an uneducated or undereducated would-be Democrat. Because why would any educated, informed person be a Republican, not a Democrat, right?
That elitism is in-bred.
There’s no getting around it.
It’s part of the air the bubble-dwelling Democrats breathe.
Bloomberg, in 2016, at the University of Oxford Said Business School was asked whether it would be possible to politically unite in peace the likes of East Coast and West Coast intellectuals and middle-of-the-road, middle-of-the-map countrified America — in other words, if he could unite by culture and politics the stereotypical liberal with the stereotypical conservative.
The former New York City mayor said: “The agrarian society lasted 3,000 years 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 a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.”
He said more. But the headlines aptly sum.
“Bloomberg implied farming doesn’t take intelligence in 2016 comments,” Fox News reported.
And from Newsweek: “Bloomberg Once Said Farming Needs Less ’Gray Matter’ Than Modern Work.”
Truthfully speaking, it is indeed easier to teach farming than, say, brain surgery. That’s not to say farming is easy, or that anyone could be a successful farmer. But it is to raise a point Bloomberg might want to mull before shooting off his mouth. And it’s a point that goes like this: On the scale of necessary jobs for the survival of the human race, one has to wonder — which is more important, farming or brain surgery?
And where exactly would politician fall on that same scale?
The problem with elitists like Bloomberg is they think that just because something doesn’t require an advanced degree, that automatically, it’s inferior. They think they are God’s gift to humanity, sent from above to save us from ourselves. They think farmers are low I.Q., soldiers are too stupid for college, mechanics and carpenters and electricians are high school dropouts, and the likes of laborers, waiters and retail clerks — simply common folk, there to order and serve.
They think the Democratic Party is the solution, not the problem.
With Barack Obama, it was “you didn’t build that.”
With Hillary Clinton, it was “basket of deplorable.”
With Pete Buttigieg, it was “trouble believing that things like Trump voters actually exist.”
With Rashida Tlaib, it was a vow to “impeach this motherf—er.”
The list goes on. The takeaway is this: Bloomberg’s condescension is not so much a misstatement as revelation and underscore of truth. It revealed his own personal sense of superiority, while underscoring this is just more evidence of how Democrats truly think, and what Democrats truly believe.
To Democrats, conservatives and Republicans will never be anything more than people who would be Democrats, if only they had adequate educations.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
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