On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” CNN Political Commentator and former Obama administration official Van Jones argued that obsessing over pronouns and the gender binary sends the message that people on the left “are not concerned about things that are affecting me every day. They’re not concerned about inflation,” and “when we start sending the cultural signal that we’re more concerned about the pronoun you put on your Zoom call than we are concerned about the fact that you don’t have a house or a job,” there’s a problem of balance.
While discussing The Atlantic’s piece “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense” Jones said, “I do think that this issue around the gender binary has taken up way too much space in the public conversation. I think that people are weary of it. I think that people having to put the…this and that and the pronouns on their Zoom, all of that stuff starts to send a signal, I think, to working-class voters that these people are not concerned about things that are affecting me every day. They’re not concerned about inflation, they’re not concerned about — which is not to say you can’t care about everybody, but there’s something that’s out of balance. And so, I think that when we start sending the cultural signal that we’re more concerned about the pronoun you put on your Zoom call than we are concerned about the fact that you don’t have a house or a job, I think the party is off track.”
He added, “I understand how people can sometimes feel that they are being left behind, they’re being left out, they’ve been sold down the river by both parties. And I think the Democrats miss opportunity after opportunity to tell people we get that and we care about it.”
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