February 27, 2019
Now we know: The Ruling Class hates us
By Sally Zelikovsky
On his HBO show Real Time last Friday, Bill Maher viciously took down red cities, red counties, red states, and red MAGA hat-wearing Americans in his shtick criticizing Amazon for telling New York State to take the 20,000+ jobs it would have brought to the Big Apple and shove ‘em. Instead, he wants Amazon to turn needy red states like Nebraska into the next Silicon Valley — because it would bring them jobs and prosperity and…would eventually turn those states blue by “re-colonizing” them.
Wait, I thought colonization was imperial, racist, and white and was wrong because it denied the people residing in those lands their right to self-determination? Oh, I see. It’s okay just as long as progressive, imperious, white guys do it to sub-human conservatives who have tilled the land and run their ranches for generations.
It should make anyone pretty uncomfortable that one class of people in a country has the hubris to believe they need to rescue poor, uneducated, toothless, MAGA-infected, Tea Party troglodytes and turn them into enlightened, tolerant, intellectually superior beings made in their progressive image.
In his own words (and I apologize for any typos in this transcript, but I just couldn’t keep listening to this drivel over and over to ensure perfection), Bill lays out, in all seriousness, that America has a “spatial geographic inequality” problem.
[This] means that the most affluent and educated people are clustered in just a few cities…. The blue parts of America are having a big prosperity party while that big sea of red feels like their invitation got lost in the mail. And they still use the mail. They turn on the TV and all the shows take place in a few hip cities. There’s no Real Housewives of Toledo or CSI Lubbock. There are no red carpets in Wyoming and no one ever asks you “Who are you wearing”? Because the answer is always “Target.”
There are two Americas and it seems like one is where all the cool jobs are, where people drive Teslas and eat artisanal ice cream. We have orchestras and theater districts and world class shopping. We have Chef Wolfgang Puck. They have Chef Boyardee. Our roofs have solar panels. Theirs have last year’s Christmas lights. We’ve got legal bud. They’ve got Bud…. The flyover states have become the passed over states. That’s why red state voters are so pissed off. They don’t hate us. They want to be us…. How do I know this? Because 238 cities and regions submitted proposals to Amazon for the company to locate in their area; all desperate for jobs that don’t involve guarding prisons and murdering chickens. And Amazon picked two places that didn’t need them at all [That would be Virginia and New York]. Places where prosperity already was. Bezos: you’re worth $130 billion. Take one for the team. Stop playing cities off against one another and help a dying one come back to life….
But if liberals are serious about winning elections, they have to start recolonizing the parts of the country they’ve abandoned. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. Amazon could buy the whole state and rename it Amazippi. If we keep leaving the red states behind, they’re going to keep getting angrier and crazier…. When Amazon moves to West Virginia, people get better jobs that don’t give them black lung. The locals meet people of different races and backgrounds and sexual orientations. None of whom kill them. They find out gays don’t ruin anyone’s marriage but they do improve the karaoke scene. A yoga studio opens up. Then an art gallery. A gym that admits women. Then one of those trendy bars…. Asians come and open a Chinese Restaurant. Then the Jews come because there is a Chinese Restaurant and before you know it there is legal weed and decent health care and the schools are teaching science again.
Where to begin? Aside from the fact there is some good ole stereotyping about gays, Jews, and Asians that only guys like Bill Maher and Joe Biden can get away with and the rest of us can’t, there’s a whole lotta stereotyping about Middle America and, I don’t think Bill is up on his stats. The states he sees as the most prosperous -- like California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois — aren’t doing so well these days. Businesses are leaving traditional blue states in droves and taking their tax dollars and jobs to the nearest red states. [Sadly, they bring with them a lot of employees who embrace blue state policies, the same ones that got them into trouble “back home” in the first place. It doesn’t take long for them to infect the body politic in the red states they now inhabit with their failed liberalism.]
The fact is, New York was dying for that Amazon pick-me-up. Long Island City needed those high-paying jobs and the collateral businesses that would spring up to meet consumer demands — like gas stations so we can kill the Earth, dentists to replace our missing teeth, affordable stores like Target so we can dress up for the Red Carpet, fancy coffee shops where we can talk about “who we wore on the Red Carpet,” and grocery stores that sell pantry staples like Chef Boyardee because we can’t afford to eat at any of Wolfie Puck’s restaurants.
New York is prosperous only for the wealthiest, the most elite — like you, Bill. Maybe if you got out of your Tesla bubble every once-in-a-while and drove upstate in New York or downstate in Illinois or in the Central Valley of California, you’d see the economic and cultural devastation. Those smart states are actually pretty stupid, dying under the weight of trillions in unfunded pension liabilities. The major cities you laud? Even the major cities in traditionally red states are riddled with crime, drugs, poverty, and cultural decline. That education you want to impose on the putrid masses stuck in the corn fields, doesn’t exist in any major city in the country — unless you are extraordinarily wealthy or extremely lucky and win the school lottery.
You might not feel it or see it because your life is so cushy, Bill, but those states and cities that are so progressive (and broken) are exclusively run by your people. Y’all have become the colonizers, the imperialists, the totalitarians-in-training.
And let’s talk about “cool” jobs. Not everyone wants to be a hipster tech drone tip-toeing through piles of human feces on the way to work in San Francisco. A lot of people want to farm. They want to work with their hands. The want to own small businesses in their small towns where everybody knows their name. Millions of Americans shy away from the corporate urban grind and long for the simplicity Small Town USA has to offer. I know for you that’s just a silly euphemism for the “basket of deplorables” they really are, clinging to their guns and Bible propaganda, but who is to say your propaganda will be any better?
Now we know: The Ruling Class hates us
By Sally Zelikovsky
On his HBO show Real Time last Friday, Bill Maher viciously took down red cities, red counties, red states, and red MAGA hat-wearing Americans in his shtick criticizing Amazon for telling New York State to take the 20,000+ jobs it would have brought to the Big Apple and shove ‘em. Instead, he wants Amazon to turn needy red states like Nebraska into the next Silicon Valley — because it would bring them jobs and prosperity and…would eventually turn those states blue by “re-colonizing” them.
Wait, I thought colonization was imperial, racist, and white and was wrong because it denied the people residing in those lands their right to self-determination? Oh, I see. It’s okay just as long as progressive, imperious, white guys do it to sub-human conservatives who have tilled the land and run their ranches for generations.
It should make anyone pretty uncomfortable that one class of people in a country has the hubris to believe they need to rescue poor, uneducated, toothless, MAGA-infected, Tea Party troglodytes and turn them into enlightened, tolerant, intellectually superior beings made in their progressive image.
In his own words (and I apologize for any typos in this transcript, but I just couldn’t keep listening to this drivel over and over to ensure perfection), Bill lays out, in all seriousness, that America has a “spatial geographic inequality” problem.
[This] means that the most affluent and educated people are clustered in just a few cities…. The blue parts of America are having a big prosperity party while that big sea of red feels like their invitation got lost in the mail. And they still use the mail. They turn on the TV and all the shows take place in a few hip cities. There’s no Real Housewives of Toledo or CSI Lubbock. There are no red carpets in Wyoming and no one ever asks you “Who are you wearing”? Because the answer is always “Target.”
There are two Americas and it seems like one is where all the cool jobs are, where people drive Teslas and eat artisanal ice cream. We have orchestras and theater districts and world class shopping. We have Chef Wolfgang Puck. They have Chef Boyardee. Our roofs have solar panels. Theirs have last year’s Christmas lights. We’ve got legal bud. They’ve got Bud…. The flyover states have become the passed over states. That’s why red state voters are so pissed off. They don’t hate us. They want to be us…. How do I know this? Because 238 cities and regions submitted proposals to Amazon for the company to locate in their area; all desperate for jobs that don’t involve guarding prisons and murdering chickens. And Amazon picked two places that didn’t need them at all [That would be Virginia and New York]. Places where prosperity already was. Bezos: you’re worth $130 billion. Take one for the team. Stop playing cities off against one another and help a dying one come back to life….
But if liberals are serious about winning elections, they have to start recolonizing the parts of the country they’ve abandoned. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. Amazon could buy the whole state and rename it Amazippi. If we keep leaving the red states behind, they’re going to keep getting angrier and crazier…. When Amazon moves to West Virginia, people get better jobs that don’t give them black lung. The locals meet people of different races and backgrounds and sexual orientations. None of whom kill them. They find out gays don’t ruin anyone’s marriage but they do improve the karaoke scene. A yoga studio opens up. Then an art gallery. A gym that admits women. Then one of those trendy bars…. Asians come and open a Chinese Restaurant. Then the Jews come because there is a Chinese Restaurant and before you know it there is legal weed and decent health care and the schools are teaching science again.
Where to begin? Aside from the fact there is some good ole stereotyping about gays, Jews, and Asians that only guys like Bill Maher and Joe Biden can get away with and the rest of us can’t, there’s a whole lotta stereotyping about Middle America and, I don’t think Bill is up on his stats. The states he sees as the most prosperous -- like California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois — aren’t doing so well these days. Businesses are leaving traditional blue states in droves and taking their tax dollars and jobs to the nearest red states. [Sadly, they bring with them a lot of employees who embrace blue state policies, the same ones that got them into trouble “back home” in the first place. It doesn’t take long for them to infect the body politic in the red states they now inhabit with their failed liberalism.]
The fact is, New York was dying for that Amazon pick-me-up. Long Island City needed those high-paying jobs and the collateral businesses that would spring up to meet consumer demands — like gas stations so we can kill the Earth, dentists to replace our missing teeth, affordable stores like Target so we can dress up for the Red Carpet, fancy coffee shops where we can talk about “who we wore on the Red Carpet,” and grocery stores that sell pantry staples like Chef Boyardee because we can’t afford to eat at any of Wolfie Puck’s restaurants.
New York is prosperous only for the wealthiest, the most elite — like you, Bill. Maybe if you got out of your Tesla bubble every once-in-a-while and drove upstate in New York or downstate in Illinois or in the Central Valley of California, you’d see the economic and cultural devastation. Those smart states are actually pretty stupid, dying under the weight of trillions in unfunded pension liabilities. The major cities you laud? Even the major cities in traditionally red states are riddled with crime, drugs, poverty, and cultural decline. That education you want to impose on the putrid masses stuck in the corn fields, doesn’t exist in any major city in the country — unless you are extraordinarily wealthy or extremely lucky and win the school lottery.
You might not feel it or see it because your life is so cushy, Bill, but those states and cities that are so progressive (and broken) are exclusively run by your people. Y’all have become the colonizers, the imperialists, the totalitarians-in-training.
And let’s talk about “cool” jobs. Not everyone wants to be a hipster tech drone tip-toeing through piles of human feces on the way to work in San Francisco. A lot of people want to farm. They want to work with their hands. The want to own small businesses in their small towns where everybody knows their name. Millions of Americans shy away from the corporate urban grind and long for the simplicity Small Town USA has to offer. I know for you that’s just a silly euphemism for the “basket of deplorables” they really are, clinging to their guns and Bible propaganda, but who is to say your propaganda will be any better?