John Ekdahl Asks Liberal Journalists a Question and They All Light Their Hair on Fire in Response

I'm genuinely jealous -- I ask liberal reporters a lot of questions on Twitter, and they just completely ignore me. What it was about this question that made it catnip for commies, I don't know. But I'm going to study the boy's technique.

Sean Davis rounds up the hysterical overreactions by people in the media -- and liberals who apparently consider themselves to be reporters by proxy (I guess on the theory that anyone on Twitter is a "reporter") -- and it's a sumptuous feast of stupid.

There were basically three types of hysterical response to a simple question about truck owners: 1) shut up, 2) you're stupid and/or sexist and/or racist, and 3) whatever, liar, trucks aren't popular (far and away my favorite delusional response to a simple question from a group of people who want you to believe they're extremely concerned about "fake news"). It turns out that people who are paid large sums of money to opine on what Americans outside the Acela province think get very upset if you demonstrate that they don't actually know any of the people about whom they pretend to be experts.

Flabby flack Frank Luntz in particular really wanted to do a deep dive on the numbers before conceding that these trucks were in fact the best-selling models of light vehicles in America, questioning whether the trucks sold well to individual customers, or were just bought en masse for construction fleets:

I don't understand his resistance to accepting a well-evidenced claim as true, especially given that his petty cavil, even if true, would not alter John's point that a great many Americans own pickups, and it would say something about the insularity of the political and media classes (but I repeat myself) if they could not even think of a distant relative who owned a pickup.

As to progs' hysterical overreactions, I can only make a simple, obvious observation.

It's about ego.

There is this weird insistence progs and journalists (but I repeat myself) in particular have -- but everyone has this egotistical kick to some degree -- that all of human experience resides somewhere within them.

A guy who's never been poor in his life will begin kinda making up bullshit about having to scrap by in college to prove he's seen that side of life, for example.

There's just this weird, egotistical unwillingness to confess that one is a human being -- and not God, who is posited to understand everything. People have this weird blasphemous tic about insisting that they are the Alpha and Omega of human experience, that all human lives are lived somewhere in their soul, and that they represent the summa of the human condition.

Progs are especially insistent on this, because they claim to have greater Empathy and Cosmopolitaness than anyone else. (Despite the fact that they're nasty buggers who have lived all their life in a six by six block range in Brooklyn, except for that one semester abroad in Barcelona that they never shut the fuck up about.)

Journalists are also very insistent on this, as the pretensions of their hack jobs require them to pretend at knowledge they simply do not have and have no interest in having ("Who cares about trucks?!!?"), but are required to bluff and bullshit about on a daily basis.

Put the two into the same body and you have a maelstrom of credential-grabbing, resume-forging egostorm bullshit.

I don't know why people have such trouble with the three words that are the beginning of all wisdom:

I.

Don't.

Know.

Not "I don't care" or "Why is that even important?!," which are the college models of the proudly ignorant.

But a simple confession of not knowing.

Including its variants, such as, "That's outside my range of knowledge" and "I really don't know anything about that."

Personally, I have never owned a truck and I'm not sure I know anyone who owns one. (I know people who definitely did own trucks when I knew them, but some I haven't seen in a while so I don't know if they still have them or have gotten an SUV or something.)

So the truck experience is outside my experience.

I don't know why that's so hard to admit. I guess it's hard to admit for the extremely narcissistic and egotistical, who feel they have to pretend they know everything about everything, that they are large and contain multitudes, and that God has prepared a mansion for all of the Saved to live in, and it's called Their Super-Good Brain.

But I don't pretend that, so it's really not a big deal to me.

Genteel Ignorance: I've noted before that it was (is) a pretension of aristocracy to take pride in not knowing things about manual labor and ordinary lives. Someone who wishes to signal he's an aristocrat will make sure he knows all about fashion, but will also never actually stitch his togs, and will proudly announce that he can't stitch them.

It's an assertion of the division of labors between the Thinking Classes (guffaw) and the Working Classes.

This truck episode seems to be similar to that.

posted by Ace at 03:50 PM

| Access Comments