Media cries misogyny as voters snub Warren
Last week, amid the drama surrounding Super Tuesday and the stunning resettling of the Democratic field in what was an electoral surprise to us all, it was no surprise that the establishment media handled it all badly, and super-badly when it came to the political demise of Elizabeth Warren.
Author Jill Filipovic has a robust resume. She has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time and elsewhere and was the senior political writer at Cosmopolitan.com. She has been an influential member of the media for some time.
When it became clear that Warren’s campaign was drawing it’s last breath, Filipovic tweeted this bit of wisdom:
“Whatever happens in November, what if all Democrats pledged that no white guys will run for president next cycle?”
If that reads to you as obscene, sexist and an example of raw racism that’s because it is. In Filipovic’s eyes, in accordance with progressive convention, Warren could not have lost on the merits. Her opponents caused her to lose drawing from their malevolent, immutable characteristics. They’re white (bad) and they are men (bad), and that means they enjoy privilege which they used to stomp Warren who is a woman (good) but marginalized as a result.
Filipovic did not reach out to Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, Lincoln Chafee or Jim Webb to see how well their privilege served them in their 2016 race against Hillary Clinton. Nor has she subsequently asked the twothirds of Democratic women in Massachusetts who did not vote for Warren last Tuesday about their motives but she’s got a blue check-mark and tons of wokeness so she owes the rest of us nothing.
On MSNBC it was more of the same. Reporter Ali Vitali mourned the loss of the candidate she was covering, stating that the Warren campaign was “unabashedly feminist every single day that we were out here on the campaign trail.”
And then, like Filipovic, Vitali went there, too.
“Elizabeth Warren was the last woman to be in this race,” she declared. “We obviously know now that we have two septuagenarian white men now left for Democratic voters to choose from.”
Apart from her gross comments, Vitali also failed to mention that Tulsi Gabbard is also a woman, and is furthermore of Asian, Polynesian and Caucasian descent, and a practicing Hindu, to boot.
To her credit, Emily Stewart of Vox.com did acknowledge the existence of Gabbard in the world but could not keep herself from lamenting the Warren loss as something far more ominous than the obvious downfall of a terrible candidate.
“It’s worth wondering what it says about us,” she wrote of Warren’s failure. “Why have we, yet again, rejected an uber-qualified woman for the highest office in the land?”
“Misogyny is almost certainly an element,” she continued. “Many Americans still question whether a woman can win the White House, and thus far, a woman hasn’t. And Warren’s campaign in some ways exemplified the challenges women face in so many aspects of life: They often have to work harder and gather more credentials to even attempt to reach the same heights as men, and even then, there’s no guarantee of success.”
And sometimes, Emily, they, like candidates who are male, are just terrible at it. Sometimes there is no reason to go any further.
It would be nice if our media would simply call balls and strikes and let’s hope that day comes soon but it is not here, yet. Here’s to hoping.