NYT columnist claims Trump supporters are ‘idiots’ and bigots who should ‘admire’ elites

NYT columnist claims Trump supporters are ‘idiots’ and bigots who should ‘admire’ elites
Trump supporters are idiots, a claim that can't be made about Trump haters

Sticks and stones.

If you support President Donald Trump, then you’re a bigot and idiot, and you should admire the establishment elite who want to run every aspect of your life. That’s according to “never-Trump” New York Times op-ed writer Bret Stephens. On Wednesday, Breitbart‘s Tony Lee devoted a column to Stephens’s observation made on MSNBC — on Independence Day, yet.

Writes Lee:

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

The Times’ and MSNBC’s insufferably smug and out-of-touch useful idiot said Warren Buffett has a wonderful line: “First come the innovators, then come the imitators, and then come the idiots.”

“I think the conservative movement has traced a similar trajectory,” he said on MSNBC, adding that “the party of Donald Trump” is associated with “exclusion, fear, and bigotry.”

Stephens whined that conservatives “demonize” and do not “admire” elites who are “educated” and care about things like “culture” and the “cultivation of the human soul.”

Stephens was recently mocked as an elitist poseur when he actually wrote a column about permanently signing off Twitter only to reveal that his assistant would be monitoring his Twitter feed. “Never Trumpers” like Stephens write for their fellow media elitists (their core base), so of course Stephens is not really signing off since he would risk giving up some of the spotlight that is put on him whenever he bashes Trump and his supporters.

Got that? According to this smug, arrogant elitist, if you support Trump, you’re obviously uneducated, are wrongly concerned about the state of our rotting culture, and you should bow down to the elites who are obviously your betters.

Breitbart’s Neil Munro also slammed Stephens’s elitism:

Stephens’ article includes several apples-to-orange statistical flubs, plus grotesque generalizations, and regurgitated business-funded agitprop. For example, Stephens says the United States “is a country of immigrants” even though roughly 84 percent of people living in the United States were born in the United States — despite the elite-backed huge influx of immigrants over the last few decades. Similarly, Stephens treats immigrants as a uniform mass, as if he believes that migrating MS-13 gang members are as beneficial as are freedom-seeking inventors.

The National Review’s Fred Bauer also got in on the slugfest, adding:

Intellectual shortcomings radically compound the economic deficiencies of the meritocratic denigration of the native-born. The worldview that poor Americans can’t cut it and should therefore be replaced by more “competitive” immigrants might fit comfortably in a corporate boardroom, but it profoundly misunderstands the purpose of citizenship and the enterprise of inclusive politics. Whether or not a poor American “deserves” to be an American is beside the point — what matters is that he is American and that, by virtue of his citizenship, he has an inherent claim to the public square and public concern. While pseudo-meritocratic initiatives to cull the weak are chic on Wall Street, they inject poison when applied to politics. Arguing that the poor and disadvantaged are somehow less worthy citizens exacerbates civic alienation; it cuts the materially unsuccessful out of the body politic and flatters the indifference of the successful, whispering to them that they are justified in sneering at the struggles of the weak. In its high-handed dismissal of the struggles of the poor, the argument that the native-born are degenerate trash-people is almost a recipe for even more populism, a force that has caused Stephens himself no small angst in recent years.

What elitists like Stephens don’t understand is that attitudes like his are precisely the reason so many Americans voted for Trump in the first place.

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Joe Newby

Joe Newby

Joe Newby is an IT professional. He has written for Conservative Firing Line, Examiner, NewsBusters, and Spokane Faith and Values.

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