Democrat presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg was caught on video trashing farmers as idiots, and now he’s lying about being taken out of context.
If there’s anything we’re discovering about Bloomberg — the former New York City mayor, the fifty-billion-dollar man, the last hope the jackass party has to stop a Jurassic Socialist from winning the nomination — it’s that when he believes he’s talking privately to a small group of fellow elites, he says things that make Barack Obama’s “bitter clinger” comments sound unifying.
Bloomberg has already been caught admitting to using New York’s “stop and frisk” policy to target young black men. He’s already been caught trashing blacks and Hispanics as too ignorant and uncivilized to find employment. And now he’s been caught ridiculing farmers as simpletons and idiots.
Worse still, Bloomberg is now denying he said what he clearly said, and naturally, some in the fake news media are attempting to gaslight us into believing the Tiny Tyrant is being taken out of context.
Well, he’s not being taken out of context, and his comments about farmers not only reflect his bigoted, urban elitism, they reflect a bubbled ignorance you can hardly wrap your mind around.
Here are Bloomberg’s comments in full, comments he made during a 2016 appearance at the University of Oxford:
If you think about it, the agrarian society lasted 3,000 years, and we could teach processes. I could teach anybody, even people in this room so no offense intended, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then you have 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow, and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture; today it’s two percent in the United States. Now comes the information economy, and the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill-sets you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree/level different. You have to have a different skill-set; you have to have a lot more gray matter. It’s not clear the teachers can teach or the students can learn, and so the challenge of society of finding jobs for these people, who we can take care of giving them a roof over their head and a meal in their stomach and a cell phone and a car and that sort of thing. But the thing that will stop them from setting up a guillotine someday, is the dignity of a job.
Here’s the video. The comments start at right around the 42 minute mark.
After the farmer comments went viral, Bloomberg campaign manager Kevin Sheekey released a statement accusing Democrat presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders and Team Trump of taking the Tiny Tyrant out of context:
The latest example comes today, with the Sanders campaign circulating a video of Mike’s comments — also shared by Donald Trump Jr. — that is taken completely out of context; the video cuts off Mike’s first sentence where he is referring to agrarian society that lasted 3,000 years, not farmers today. In just the past three months, Mike has traveled to 26 states. During that time, he has met with farmers and heard directly about the struggles they face. The Bernie Sanders campaign is choosing to push out falsehoods and sow divisions within the Democratic party.
Obviously, anyone who watches the original video, or who reads the full context of the transcript, knows Bloomberg was definitely not taken out of context — not even close.
To begin with, he’s not talking about agrarian society as it existed 3,000 years ago, he’s talking about an agrarian society that lasted 3,000 years. Everything he says, everything he refers to, is in the present tense. This is made clear when he says, “I could teach anybody, even people in this room so no offense intended, to be a farmer.”
He’s not talking about teaching people to farm 3,000 years ago, he’s talking about teaching them to be a farmer today.
Hey, any yokel can be a farmer. Anyone! It’s so easy!
The fact that he’s speaking in present tense is made even clearer when he says, “and the skill-sets you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree/level different. You have to have a different skill-set; you have to have a lot more gray matter.”
Again, he is not talking about how farmers from 3,000 years ago would lack the gray matter and skill-set, he’s talking about the “gray matter” problem with farmers (and factory workers) today.
How do we train these RedStateTards? You can’t! They’re too stupid!
The overall point Bloomberg is making is What the hell do we do with all these stupid farmers and factory workers, how do we do more than give them welfare? (“a roof over their head and a meal in their stomach and a cell phone and a car and that sort of thing”). He is quite obviously saying How do we train today’s stupid farmers and factory workers who are probably incapable of learning how to exist in the information age? (“It’s not clear the teachers can teach or the students can learn, and so the challenge of society of finding jobs for these people”).
In order to believe Bloomberg was talking about farmers 3,000 years ago, or factory workers 300 years ago, you would have to believe that while speaking at Oxford, he went off into some bizarre flight of fancy about the difficulties that would occur if a time machine started to transport people from the past into the present. But again, Bloomberg has such a low opinion of the intelligence of us simple folk, he probably thinks he can get away with an absurd claim of being taken out of context.
You know, I spent three long summers working on a small, 16-cow dairy farm. So I know a thing or two about farming, and other than being awed by how hard farmers work, nothing was more impressive than the intelligence required to be a successful farmer.
What you have in farmers, in this case my grandfather and grandmother, are people who are so smart and resourceful, they’re able to do pretty much everything. They not only have to be meteorologists and botanists in order to ensure the crops come in, they have to be veterinarians as a means to keep their animals healthy.
What’s more, my grandparents knew how to butcher, dry, can, and jar food. They were also experts in the arts of construction and mechanics.
Believe this… You cannot be a successful farmer as a jack-of-all trades-master-of-none. You either master them all or you quickly go bankrupt paying others to come in and solve your problems.
My grandfather was not only resourceful, he was an inventor. I still remember how he used pulleys, springs, and a barrel of gravel to make it easy for my grandmother to lift a garage door. I still remember him welding a piece of metal into a massive handle that attached to a spring, which allowed us to release the clutch when standing on the hitch of the tractor. This brilliant invention saved enormous time and effort because we didn’t have to climb onto the tractor to drive 20 feet to the next bale of hay that needed to be picked up. By the way, this tractor pulled a wagon he built that was only six inches off the ground, which made throwing those bales much, much easier.
You want to know how smart my farmer-grandparents were? Even as a teenager who thought he was smarter than everyone, who worked overtime to act unimpressed by everything, I never stopped being shocked by how capable they were. Their resourcefulness was so impressive, it overcame my near fatal case of teenage arrogance.
And that was 40 years ago.
Imagine the resourcefulness required of farmers today in the digital age — where they’re dealing with computers, GPS, the genetic engineering of plants and animals, and a dozen things I’m missing because I haven’t worked on a farm since 1985 — but unlike Bloomberg, I have enough life experience and humility to admit I don’t know what I don’t know.
And here’s a final point that needs to be made.
If Michael Bloomberg and everyone like Michael Bloomberg and all the companies they created disappeared tomorrow… If I disappeared tomorrow, and all the people who do what I do disappeared tomorrow… If every artist, movie star, pundit, writer, cable TV network, cable news network, newspaper, journalist, radio station, movie studio, poet, and playwright disappeared tomorrow… Yes, we would miss them, but after a couple weeks we would adjust and move on.
The farmer, however, is indispensable. Without the farmer we all die.
Mike Bloomberg is an elitist, a tiny tyrant, and a liar. So, in a way, the world would actually be much, much, much better off without him.
Bloomberg might be smart, but he is shockingly and unforgivably bigoted, dishonest, and ignorant.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.