Eric Boehlert said what every Obama voter, Hillary voter, and Democrat has been screaming at political coverage of the 2016 election for the last four years. What about US?
On Saturday, he spoke to Tiffany Cross and Nikole Hannah-Jones about the massive and infuriating media fail that has been happening since Trump won the electoral college in 2016. That is, they flailed about for years wondering why people voted for Trump, and decided that was the focus that needed to be magnified. As Cross said, they "tried to invent this narrative of white economic anxiety."
I cannot begin to imagine how maddening and soul-crushing it's been for Black women especially, seeing these reporters ignore the racism and sexism to which Trump voters responded. Suddenly, once Biden needs electing, the media decides to pay attention. Cross told Boehlert, "I have to tell you this 11th hour of wokeness, we've been an alarm clock for centuries in this country. Where was this wokeness for the past few decades?"
Boehlert is one of the few people who seems to understand.
And that began the marathon with white voters in midwestern diners, right? Trump voter stories, Trump voter stories that never pulled back the curtain and never suggested that there was going to be a mob. So there's been a failure for four years.
You know, we talk about, you know, white grievances. We talk about economic anxiety. There's been a complete failure to understand this has been a hate movement, this has been a dangerous, radical hate movement, that the Republican party has completely enveloped. After the election, they embraced this idea of waging war on free and fair elections in this country.
It's been a deliberate failure of imagination on the part of the political press in terms of dealing with Trump, and in terms of glorifying his white voters. And the message for the last four years, unequivocally, has been that white voters, specifically white working-class voters from the midwest, are the most authentic voices in America, and those are the ones we have to listen to. Those are the ones who are driving this country.
Democrats just flipped Georgia twice, they flipped Arizona, they brought together this amazing (?) than anyone in American history. Where are the Biden voter stories? Just like where are the Obama voter stories? There were none. This news beat has been invented out of whole cloth to appease the right-wing movement, to show the press we're not liberal. "Oh, look, we're gonna pretend all these Trump voters are just hard-working folk in search of a voice. We're not going to suggest there's a dark racist movement that's fueling all of this."
You know, that mob, that mob should not have been a surprise to anybody. That's what happens. You fuel hate when you take down the guardrails, when you whip up a mob like that. That was the inevitable end to all of this, and it's not over yet. But that was the inevitable conclusion when the press refuses to hold up a truthful mirror to a hate movement in the country that operates under the umbrella of the Republican party.
Tiffany Cross agreed, wondering after everything African-Americans have been through in this country, why was't the term "Black economic anxiety" ever coined?
Why, indeed?
