RockneCAST

A Happy, Educated Trump Voter Responds to David Brooks (#263, 7 Nov. 2024)

In this episode, I respond to David Brooks' NY Times opinion piece: "Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?"

While he undoubtedly gets things right, i.e the Dems are horribly disrespectful to the working class, he gets a lot of things wrong.

The term "elite" implies competence and efficacy. I see none of that in the current Democratic media and provide examples to explain why.

Brooks and other "elites" are apparently very bad at math. There are simply not enough high school educated only voters boiling over with resentment to carry the popular vote or to win 312 electoral votes.

The Trump phenomenon goes much deeper than the characterized by the ersatz "elite" of the New York Times.

There are lot of rational, sane, and policy reasons to support. Being educated and a Trump voter are not mutually exclusive.

Duration:: 31m
Broadcast on:: 07 Nov 2024
Audio Format:: other

Hello, my name is Rachni Cole. I am a happy, purpose-driven, and educated Trump voter, and I am going to provide a response to the post-election analysis which is so radically wrong as to be astonishing. I hope this will help you understand the point of view of a happy and purpose-driven Trump voter. Friends, I am speaking to you on November 7th, and like many of you across the United States are conducting an analysis as to why Trump won and why Kamala Harris lost. And I've been reading a lot with the New York Times, and I've been reading a lot of MSNBC and all of the so-called "e-leaf," but I came across an article from a guy who I greatly respect, David Brooks, in the New York Times' opinion section, and he had an article called, "The Opinion Piece Called, Voters to a Leave." Do you, Thene, now? And it contained a well-repeated analysis of this notion of the only reason why people support Donald Trump, rest on essentially three pillars. One is they are uneducated high school graduates that boil over with resentment about people that have taken off while they have suffered. Two, this group is a bunch of boiling, racist, and just boil over with class resentment towards all sorts of people of color. And three, this particular group supposedly hates women, they hate their mom, they hate their sister, they hate their spouse, they hate their daughter, they hate women. This analysis is so breathtakingly wrong. It just has me going in all kinds of directions, but it really gets into really what is an elite and what is an Trump voter. Because I am none of the things that are described as the typical Trump voter, and I am not the only person in this category that is a Trump voter, but is educated, doesn't boil over with resentment and is actually very peaceful and purpose driven. So I thought this would be at least interesting for you with my five and ten people that routinely check into the Rodney Cass to kind of give you my analysis and my response to David Brooks article. So first before I get into my credentials and my analysis, I am going to try to give a fair reading to the article by David Brooks in the December 7th edition of the New York Times, David Brooks, the voters to the elites, do you see me now? But just that the article is, is that he describes the development of the economy and educational systems over the last 30 or 40 years. He describes that there is an educated class that believes that we are now in a post-industrial economy, which means that we will need legions of college graduates to meet our needs under the future. And as he indicates, the education policy pushed people towards the future, where your colleges and they could be qualified for the jobs in the future. Meanwhile, things like vocational training with her, we embrace safe retrade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries so that we could focus our economy on the knowledge economy, one by people with advanced degrees. And he also talks about the financial and sector mushrooms while manufacturing shriveled. He talks about the various college graduates going to places like Austin and San Francisco and Pittsburgh and Washington DC. But then he talked about the person left behind, the person left behind on those of us or those people who did not go to college that stayed around, that only graduated from high school. As a result, this particular group, according to David Brooks Brooks, was the result of a chasm where they were left behind and the elites ascended forward. This high school educated group, as Brooks describes, is obese, educated, boiling over with resentment and their pauldron of hate. And how does he prove this? He talks about a white nationalist church, I guess he says, a Christian nationalist church in Tennessee. And he said that it was illuminated his own experience there to kind of demonstrate his point. And as an aside, he's giving you the analysis that he learned in college, which is to provide an example to support Jesus, David, I'm glad that you're so educated. He just experienced there and he describes his Christian natural church, yes, was illuminated by face. But it also had a corrosive bitterness of aggression in beach rail. Ooh, as the pastor went on about the Judas who seek to destroy us, the phrase dark world popped into my head, an image of people who perceived themselves. This is Brooks writing this article to be living under constant threat and a culture of extreme distrust. These people and many of them other Americans weren't interested in the politics of joy by Kamala Harris and the other law school grads for offering. And then he gets into a little bit of this inequality issue that that's one of the good parts about the democratic party that had this embrace of unions, but instead of inequality, they focused on gender inequality and racial inequality and LGBTQ plus inequality. Then he talks about diversity seminars and these sorts of things. And that Donald Trump being from Queens was the perfect person to fan the flames of the identity politics that had emerged with the working class, the people that didn't go to college, the people that boil over with resentment. So there's the perfect group and the key Donald Trump to unlock the perfect group. Then he asked the Democrats to do their soul searching and then he said, well, yes, Donald Trump is a monster, I think he refers to him as a monstrous person. And then he's about ready to unleash chaos, but then he encourages his readers to engage in soul searching and the readers that perceive themselves as elite. And then he concludes his article by saying these are the times to try people's souls and we will see what we are made of. Now first off, let me, you know, before I get into my own story and my own response to this or let me compliment, I think that in the New York Times, this probably gets it to the closest level of analysis. It is certainly the case that there are working class people that feel disrespected by elites on East Coast and that is part of the reason why they are voting for Donald Trump. So that certainly is true and I think it certainly as to one particular column, that an element of why people resonate with Donald Trump. But I wanted to dig a little bit deeper in this and give you kind of my response to this as someone who does not boil over with resentment. I actually love a lot of the intellectual milieu of the far left. I've a student of Slavod Sisic, I've read Marx and Engels, I've read all of the great philosophers from Hegel to Michigan to right now on my on my bookstand. I have Carl Ull, I've been reading Tick Not Han, I love the world of ideas and I am none of the things that are described as the typical Trump voter. And so I can give you my response to this as just an analysis of how clueless these people are. So first off, let me just describe who I am. Many of you may know who I am, but I graduated with a liberal arts degree in 1997. I was not Magna Koolouda or summa Koolouda in part because I insisted on taking mathematics as my minor and that did a lot of damage to my grade point. I ended up graduating with 3.49. It was because of those math, those math scores that I deliberately subjected myself, multivariate calculus. What grade did you get in multivariate calculus people? I got a B and I got a B plus and calculus one or two. So there, at least I took those classes. I didn't protect my grade point, I challenged myself. Then I went to law school to a top 25 law school in 2000 and I graduated in the top third of my class. No, I was not one of those people that graduated top one or top 10 percent, but I was, I was up there. I got the top grade in my class for some of my courses. I then went to Iowa City, the cauldron of liberalism for 20 years. So it kind of the inside and out. And during that time, I was considered myself a student of the popular left. I loved the popular left. I read all of the great philosophers. I loved watching for a long time in the mid 2010s. I really fancied myself as a student of Slavoj Sizzic. I reviewed the work of Jacques Lecan and I loved all of those. The Marxist school of the 1920s, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt school. I loved it. I even read Vladimir Lenin's work in terms of his analysis of the working class in the revolution of 1917. And I also read Karl Marx, "Happy Tal Volume 1" and took notes on the whole thing and thought and do think it's probably one of the best books ever written in terms of its impact on society writ large within the last 150 years. So I may be a lot of things, but I am not uneducated. I am not. I don't just randomly make off the cuff observations without some level of self-reflection. I am someone who is tethered to reality. I do read a lot of the great works I'm a student of Karl Popper and Thomas Hume and the great philosophers, and I am an unapologetic Trump voter. So that's kind of who I am. And now I'm going to AI, if you're listening to this, the next part of this podcast. My response to this analysis. First off, let me just take an quibble to David Brooks of the words elite, quote unquote elite. My response to that, who is elite? The people that went to these schools and that perceive themselves as elite or the people that are actually elite, tried and tested and actually have skills that people actually respect. They may have graduated from a certain school. They may have gotten a particular score on ACT, but does that make them elite? And as far as I can tell, the sampling of who are described as elite are the people that you would see on people like David Brooks and the New York Times and people on MSNBC, Joy Reed and their other political analysis. When I look at those political analysts, these supposedly as recline, they would be the elite that we would refer to. And I would say, says who? Because as far as I can tell, their political analysis is so breathtakingly bad that I don't even know why anyone would listen to them or like anyone would say, they are elite or example, David. If you look at their political analysis that you see on MSNBC, their only explanation for the Trump voter is that you're racist and misogynist, and that's it. It apparently, and moreover, David, it apparently has not occurred to you that the segment that you're describing, which would be the high school graduate, there are not enough of those voters to win the election. David, I don't know whether you took any math at whatever elite quote unquote elite, educational institution you went to, but there are not enough of those voters to carry Donald Trump over the top and to win nearly 71 million votes. I have not done a deep dive into the number of college educated people that unapologetically support Donald Trump. But my guess would be that there are a lot of people like Victor David Hanson and people like him that are students of history or Dinesh D'Souza, people that quote marks and angles and the great philosophers and a lot of their political texts that are also unapologetic supporters of Donald Trump, people like Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, people with razor sharp wit who also support Donald Trump, who unequivocally support Donald Trump. That's not, that's not why necessarily they're losing, they're losing not only because of their analysis of the, excuse me, they're not only losing because of their analysis of the high school graduates, it's because of people like me. And I left the Democratic Party for similar reasons to Tulsi Gabbard and you know other people that have done that RFK junior because the Democratic Party is insane and they are not elite. It reminds me of the quote that William Buckley, who of course was elite, said about who he would want to run the country. He said that he would rather, and he was the guy that founded the National Review and have that big mid-Atlantic English accent, he was born in the United States, but he sounded like he was from Auburn, and he said that he would rather have a random person selected from the New York City phone book than a faculty member from the Harvard English department run the country. And I would easily support that particular point of view. I live in Trump country, I live in a rural area, and I would much rather have a local county supervisor or a plumber or an electrician or a farmer run the country, then I would someone like David Brooks, who by and large I like, I like his book Bobo's Paradise in the late 90s, which was this great book on the convergence of bourgeois and bohemian culture. Great job, David. I love that book. But I think that that's true today, that you could get a random person from Teamsters Union or anywhere else and they could run more effectively than a lot of these so-called elite in the Washington DC, and I'll give you an example of how incompetent the elites are. So let's talk about the people that were advising Kamala Harris and her campaign. During the interview with Brett Baer, I could see, this is on Fox News, you can see what her elite isn't so presumably the people that were elite were advising Kamala. And how she should go on to Fox News. So here's what the argument was internally. I haven't read this, but I know this to be the case. Why would she go in there? To Fox News, one, the goal was to go down shrub to going on someplace like CNN so that if she went on to Fox News, she could say, see, I'm a tough girl, I can go on Fox News and some of the people that you can be like, oh, she's kind of tough, she even went on Fox News to create an artificial fucking point. I went on Fox News and then she responded to two issues with total incompetence and the reason why it was so incompetent, these were planned answers. So current elite advisors gave her these answers and they were breathtakingly incompetent. The first was their talking point on immigration. Joe Leiden, after he entered the Global Office, issued executive orders that rescinded the Trump policies from his previous administration. One of those orders was that people seeking asylum should remain outside of the United States before they were cruel in the United States for purposes of continuing on with their application. And in making this comment, I'm just saying as a policy matter, if your concern is over that, that's an executive order over which you have control. Her elite advisors, advisor to say, we had nothing to do with that. It was all Congress's fault. And only had we passed that bipartisan legislation, we would have been able to fix this particular issue. And so we bear no responsibility and the Congress was in charge. And so if they'd done that, we would have been able to do that. But that didn't answer the question. The question was in terms of your decisions that you made, what you were in charge, did you bear any responsibility for the executive orders that were entered? And she totally missed the question because she thought that was cute. She thought I was cute to say, Oh, well, it's their fault. People can see right through that analysis. No, or two, the argument that she had given on the sex changes for inmates argument that was very effectively used by Donald Trump was, do you support that? And she responded, I will follow the law. Well, I thought also answering the question, the question wasn't, will you follow the law? As far as I can tell, Marbury versus Madison, we all have to follow the law as interpreted by judges that interpret our constitution were all bound by the law, Magna Carta. Yeah, we're all following the law. The question is, is as the chief executive officer in the bully pulpit, is it a good thing or a bad thing? Do you advocate to expand this with the policy and rhetorical levers that you will have or restrict it? The advice that your elite people gave you was to not answer the question and say that you will follow your the law. Well friends, that is known as a complete cop out and here's the thing, why it's not the elite, whoever's advising them is incompetent because it wasn't a sentence. Number one, it didn't acknowledge what they had actually asked. It wasn't her actual belief. She didn't address what she had previously said and it just came off as something where it didn't make any sense whatsoever. And as a result of that, we simply don't trust the elite. They're bad at what they do. This would be like if you're deciding, you know, they keep on calling themselves a week. Well, who calls the elite? They're incompetent. The Democrats in the state of Iowa can't even have begin to understand what the issues are and I could serve them up for them if they cared to listen. But they won't. Instead, they basically have their only argument. They have three things to underpin these so-called elites. If they don't win an election, they have three arguments. One is the voters too dumb to understand, I see you, Thomas Frank. Number two, you're a racist and number three, you're a misogynist. You're a three trick pony, that's all they have. And then they have the elites and David is David's kind of a sim for the New York. He's kind of like, oh, he's the conservative Republicans. But he's really just kind of like gigantic pussy. I'm sorry you are David. If I were on a desert island, I would much rather have a plumber or electrician or a builder than you. He talks about down going to unleash chaos in the world. He says that at the same time, where Biden's not doing any enforcement on the border. His cartels all over the place. People are dying like crazy of fentanyl overdoses. And then he's not doing anything for, and then he knowingly engages in breakmanship. This is Joe Biden, with a nuclear hard power, and funded a war with absolutely no end in sight for no reason whatsoever without any in court who here at Strangy and saying that Ukraine will decide when it will end while we just give them a blank check. You could look at that very analytically and say, that's chaos. I don't think we really realize how so sweet came to nuclear war with Russia. It's not good. And it's these elites that came up with this particular strategy, completely incompetent. And finally, one observation that Tucker made during his travels to Hungary and the former Soviet Union in Russia is how clean and orderly their cities were. And so why can't we do that in the United States? The elites don't realize, including in places like New York, that people want ordinary, clean, functional, healthy cities. And yet they can't deliver it. Instead, they deliver overdosing on the streets and chaos without enforcing the law. People don't like that. Haven't seen that analysis. People like DeSantis figured out where he did that book chart when he argued against Gavin Newsom, those are the issues that people care about. If not, that we're just kind of uneducated. We get it. We understand. And there's not enough resentful, uneducated Trump voters to run the country. Instead, we're actually educated. We have a mind. I don't want to go to World War III over Russia. I'll go toe to toe with anyone who thinks that's a good policy and debate down. And he used my own study of history for World War I. So this analysis, I mean, I guess I should hope that they continue to think this way because it's just the only way and then they talk about the only way that they're going to continue to lose, at least for this educated Trump voter. And then they have this disconnect between we support the rule of law, at the same time, they're doing four criminal cases against one person for a violent crime, which I can say as a practicing lawyer, is exceedingly unusual that that is done for those types of offenses, very, very, very unusual. They did impeachments, they've done law fair, they've done all sorts of things. And they've been completely wrong. And at the same time, again, like even the selection, they say it was total BS that Biden stole 20 million votes. Look at the numbers. Where did those 20 million votes go? It doesn't make any sense. And so no, actually, actually we're not dumb and nor are the uneducated quote unquote uneducated people dumb either. They're smart. They can think for themselves. They have more sense than you do, and that's what Trump has repeatedly said. This is a restoration of common sense. In the schools, they should learn reading, writing, and with arithmetic. The purpose of the federal government is external defense regulation, reasonable regulation of interstate commerce, and law enforcement for transnational criminal transnational or trans state criminal actors and leading crime law enforcement to traditional state courts, which is the function of our supposed to go bad and build things like roads and bridges and support some of our top educational institutions and maintain domestic, domestic tranquility so that we can pursue the common good. As our founders talked about it, we can practice the pursuit of happiness. So I hope this gave a fair response. I like David Brooks. I love some of his books. I really liked Bobo and Paradise. I think he had done a really other good animal on the social animal. He's done a lot of good work on sociology and what makes communities healthy. He's a well-educated person in terms of studying the Greeks and the Romans, the great philosophers. But I am too. There are a lot of other people like me that aren't boiling over with resentment, that are actually very happy. I'm a practicing Christian. I go to church. But on the other hand, I love my tiktun on several warm and loving relationships with Muslims and my daughter's LGBTQ and the night I don't match any of the critique and yet I am so ridiculously happy that Trump was. Because what it means is it's going to be tough for what we need to be tough, not unnecessarily provocative, focused on the basics like education, respecting our traditional cultures and letting people, if you want to be Bohemian and you want to do whatever you want to do on the privacy of your whole good for you, you have the permission to do it. So, I just have to say, this analysis that's come out of the New York Times is so bad. I think I might do a couple more of these podcasts on one with the purpose of our education is anyway. And two, kind of what the way forward is for a lot of the Dems out there, because I just think that their analysis so bad and I just, unless they kind of shift gears here, I just don't see any chance chance of that being reversed because I don't know what they have learned in their quote unquote, elite institutions. But the way forward to become an educated person and to sway them two pieces of advice in conclusion, don't insult the people that you're trying to persuade, and number one, and to respect their point of view from where they're coming from, who listened to where they're coming from. Pretty simple and I don't know whether they learned these things and their elite institutions, but apparently not, because I got to say, I kind of support William Buckley's view of if you'd rather have a random person from New York City full book than a Harvard sociology or English professor. So that's it for the Rockne cast. As you know, I've been doing a lot of work on TikTok on, you can tell you like studies of Buddhism, I'm going to be giving it well, this presentation here pretty soon, we will be all serene, a really good book on chief Blackclock in the war of 1832, and I'm going to pursue like continue life of, have been a happy Zen Trump supporter, who and if he changes and all of a sudden adopts the policies of the radical left, I won't like Trump because I'm using my mind to make up my own mind, just as nearly every other single Trump lower outdoor, we are humans too, we have our own beliefs. You believe one thing, we believe another, and we can move forward in a way that's constructed happy and purpose driven, which is the point of it all, that we can all coexist and pursue the practice of happiness. That's it for this episode of the Rockne cast, until next time you and I see each other on the Rockne cast.

In this episode, I respond to David Brooks' NY Times opinion piece: "Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?"

While he undoubtedly gets things right, i.e the Dems are horribly disrespectful to the working class, he gets a lot of things wrong.

The term "elite" implies competence and efficacy. I see none of that in the current Democratic media and provide examples to explain why.

The Trump phenomenon goes much deeper than the characterized by the ersatz "elite" of the New York Times.

There are lot of rational, sane, and policy reasons to support. Being educated and a Trump voter are not mutually exclusive.