Don’t Pull a Toobin
Jeffery Toobin recently inadvertently (?) exposed himself on a Zoom call with New Yorker magazine peers. Dumb.
This serves as a great (sad) metaphor for today’s left leaning / lurching institutions, namely Democrat leadership (Fed, State, Local), the news media, the elitist Washington establishment, and of course the radical left (think BLM, Antifa, and most Medium readers).
How so, you ask?
Here’s how. Toobin got careless. He thought he was offline. He didn’t pay attention. And he was weak — he gave in to the urges of base temptation and pleasure while on someone else’s dime. The left continues to expose themselves daily, but, like the Emperor with No Clothes, they simply applaud one another and think no one sees them as they are.
Pick any leader from the aforementioned groups as an example.
Careless. Joe Biden ran his campaign from his basement, with the blessing of his campaign strategists, assuming and believing most Americans are like them, and would accordingly vote for him. Hillary Clinton made the same mistake in 2016. Turns out 73 million+ Americans voted Trump and sent a very clear message to the left — don’t go there — yet Democratic leadership and leftists dismiss these people as hopeless deplorables rather than trying to muster even a small amount of emotional intelligence and seek to understand what other people are thinking and why. Biden almost (may have) lost the election due to his careless lackluster campaign.
Offline. Today, sadly, there is no such thing as “offline”. Certainly not if you a) make your living in the 24 hour news cycle, ginning up one lame story / crisis / outrage after another, facts be damned, or b) are a Tech Oligarch or addicted Tech Consumer living in your own bubble, gladly filtering / cancelling / or otherwise ignoring the views and positions of those who don’t think like you do. Oddly, these people are constantly online but see nothing.
Inattentive. Can you say “pollster” or “pundit”? You would think in today’s age of AI, algorithms, and big data we could do better at predicting things. And we can. But the geniuses making the calls still either haven’t figured out how to eliminate their own implicit biases or, more likely, are too beholden to the consumers of their misinformation (giving them what they want to hear or supporting malevolent intent to reduce opposition voter turnout) to care if they actually get it right. Sometimes you need to validate data and conclusions against what you can see, hear, and touch — because it’s right there for everyone to see.
Weak. Rahm Emmanuel famously quoted Winston Churchill when he said, “never let a good crisis go to waste”. But that is exactly what the Obama administration did. They had the White House, both branches of Congress, and a strong mandate from American voters to deliver on their promise of “Hope and Change”. What did they deliver? An ill-conceived health care reform package. Eight years of growing racial strife and division. A weak over-regulated post meltdown economy. Lame foreign policy. The Obama administration gave in to the temptation to try something they weren’t elected to do.
Today’s Democrat leaders at the Federal, State, and Local level are weak — they tell us to shelter in place with a mask while they flaunt their own rules. They tell us we must defund the police and reach out to their neighboring cities and counties for protection or wonder why no one shows up when they call 911.
BLM pushes a thinly veiled socialist agenda cloaked in a “social justice” cause and a noble slogan while they remain sickeningly silent on the increasing crime rates in neighborhoods many of their followers and Antifa have ravaged and burned. They mock and denigrate any Black American who dares not to embrace their radical ideas, who strives for a stable family life and good education and opportunity for their children without kowtowing to their divisive rhetoric and self-serving agenda. Weak.
So there you have it. As Jeffery Toobin might put it, the Left needs to get a grip.
