Democrats are making the same devastating mistakes that they made in the 2016 election by writing off large portions of the country as racists, instead of trying to understand economic concerns of these voters. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Democrats are making the same devastating mistakes that they made in the 2016 election by writing off large portions of the country as racists, as homophobes, instead of trying to understand the economic concerns that these voters have. You and I did a story on that buffoon who wrote a book, it was Tom Schaller, now Paul Waldman, Schaller and Waldman came out with this book, and it was just talking about how the rural south is just upside down. They’re racist, they’re homophobes, they hate everybody, they just love their guns and hate everybody else. Well, since then, some writers have come in, Les Leopold, who we’ve interviewed Les Leopold. A brilliant thinker. Said, you guys are absolute morons. Basically, that’s what he says. He says, Tom Schaller, you are a moron. Paul Waldman, you’re way off base. Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Les Leopold, who’s by the way, one of the best people on labor issues, working class issues, he is phenomenal. But he kind of almost reluctantly writes this big article because he has been doing research for one of his books because he researches things very thoroughly and he says, listen, I can basically pick apart every single argument you guys have made. You are not using actual empirical data. In fact, your points in this book go against the empirical data. Because what the data shows us, and Leopold lays this out beautifully, is that the South, the area this white rural rage is directed at, is actually becoming less racist, less homophobic.
Mike Papantonio: Xenophobe
Farron Cousins: Less right wing Christian zealot, all that. It’s actually going down. They’re becoming more accepting. They’re not the people you say they are. What the difference is, however, is that these people are absolutely getting crushed economically.
Mike Papantonio:Right.
Farron Cousins: And it does remind me so much of 2016 when Trump won that election. What did we hear? Oh, well, all these people are racist. And you had some people
Mike Papantonio: They’re deplorables. They’re Deplorables, which Hillary created, they’re all deplorable. They’re idiots. They don’t have enough sense of protect themselves.
Farron Cousins: Right. They’re all racist, they’re all xenophobic. But then you had some people say, well, hold up. Whoa, whoa, whoa. There’s this economic anxiety and what happened was that those people who talked about the economic anxiety, and that is the exact phrase they used, they got trashed by those of us on the left. Well, I don’t say us on the left. I didn’t do that.
Mike Papantonio:You did not. And to your credit, you did not.
Farron Cousins: But what they did was they wrote off an entire millions of people because they didn’t want to look beyond the surface. Because yeah, Donald Trump came out and he said, listen, you’ve got immigrants coming in and they’re taking your jobs and that’s why your economic situation is bad. But at least he was talking about their economic situation. He knew to tap into that.
Mike Papantonio: It was all about economics.
Farron Cousins: And give them someone to blame.
Mike Papantonio: It was all about economics. Look, they were living paycheck to paycheck. They had no way to control the economics of their life. Every day they turn on the TV, it was worse for them. And then you had the Democrats calling ’em deplorables rather than saying, no. Okay, what’s wrong here? It’s an economic issue. And you had every buffoon out there trying to say, let’s deal with this with one big brush. And you couldn’t do it. As a matter of fact, Leopold did exactly what he should have done. He said, let me look at the real statistics. Well, you’re gonna be surprised. White working classes, they favor on the issue of anti-gay. Okay. Oh, everybody in the rural South is anti-gay. No, 2020, the number was there for these idiots who wrote this book. All they had to do is look. It was 76.7, said, no, gays have a right, lesbians have a right to adopt children. They can do that. On the issue of immigration, these idiots that wrote this book, these documents, these numbers were clearly there and they’re reputable numbers. It said, on the issue of the legal status for immigrants, should illegal immigrants have the right to have a job if they pay taxes and they haven’t been convicted of a felony? You know what the number was of acceptance in the rural South that these people were going after? 61.8% said yes. Racist, I mean, you could go all day long. They didn’t do their job. And then you had this chatter monkey, this buffoon, Tom Schaller, showing up on MSNBC and CNN. He was like the chatter monkey of the day, just spewing all of this hate about the white rural South without ever addressing the real seams here, which is the numbers.
Farron Cousins: Because it’s easier to do that. If you can write off all of these people and say, listen, they suck. Which is basically what they’re saying. Like, eh, screw these guys. Then you don’t have to worry about the economic issues that they face. You don’t have to worry that the state of Alabama has a poverty level that the United Nations says is worse than most third world countries. You don’t have to deal with that Democrats, because there’s a lot of racists in Alabama. And sure, you know what, there are racists. I’m not saying they don’t exist. I’m not saying that hateful people don’t exist.
Mike Papantonio: Of course they do.
Farron Cousins: They exist all over the country. But you cannot lump every single person that doesn’t vote for your candidate into that box just to act like you don’t have to deal with them.
Mike Papantonio: You know what it reminds me of? When a book came out about the dysfunctional mind of the liberal. Do you remember? I don’t know if that’s the exact title, but it was years ago, they came out and they said that liberals are mentally unstable. And they gave all the reasons that liberals were mentally unstable. It was years ago. I think we might of all the way back to our early days doing the Ed Schultz show. But the argument was that they’re not clear thinkers, that they’re hysterical, that they are not constructive thinkers, and that they’re easily made fearful and the whole list was ridiculous. And they said, this is the mind of anybody who calls himself a progressive. Well, it was garbage. It was total utter garbage. And at least I remember us doing the show where we said, what a ridiculous take.
Farron Cousins: Savage. That’s the, Michael Savage.
Mike Papantonio: Michael Savage. Okay. You’re right. It was Michael Savage?
Farron Cousins: It took me a minute for it to click.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, but you remember the story though, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: And this thing was selling like crazy. And it was just like this list of things of how crazy progressive liberals were. And he said, I talked to these scientists, I talked to these psychiatrists, if you read it, it was a pretty compelling read. But then when you drill down to it, just like we were doing right here, it was nonsense. Absolute nonsense.
Farron Cousins: Ring of Fire founder and host of America’s Lawyer, Mike Papantonio has a new book came out this week called, “Suspicious Activity.” Like his other books before it, this book actually deals with real legal cases that Mike Papantonio has handled, but in a fictionalized way. The book follows the character of Nick Deketomis that Papantonio first introduced in his book, “Law and Disorder,” and it carries on the story that began in “Law and Disorder” through “Law and Vengeance,” “Law and Addiction,” “Inhuman Trafficking,” and now “Suspicious Activity.” This book, in particular, deals with the financial institutions that have helped launder money for terrorist organizations, which of course is a topic we have covered extensively here on Ring of Fire. So if you’re a follower of Mike Papantonio’s books, or if this is your first one, you can get your copy of “Suspicious Activity” now. Just go to MikePapantonio.com and place your order. And if you haven’t already, check out Mike’s other books, also available on MikePapantonio.com.
