Edited video of Bloomberg isn’t whole story
It appears to insult farmers, factory workers
A video circulated by President Donald Trump’s supporters on Monday, with more than a million views, attempts to show presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg making disparaging remarks about farmers and manufacturing workers.
But the short, edited clip from a 2016 appearance by Bloomberg at the University of Oxford, doesn’t provide the full context of the presentation.
In the video circulated on Twitter, Bloomberg says: “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.”
But the video deleted the first part of that statement, in which Bloomberg says, “if you think about the agrarian society (that) lasted 3,000 years, we could teach processes.”
In the full video, the Democrat presidential candidate wasn’t referring to modern agriculture at all, and “Team Trump is deliberately misleading Americans,” said Bloomberg spokesman Brandon Weathersby.
In the video, Bloomberg went on to address U.S. manufacturing and more about agriculture, saying: “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% of the world worked in agriculture; today it’s 2% 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 … You have to have a lot more gray matter.”
The Twitter reaction to the edited version of the video was visceral, with farmers and others saying the billionaire former New York mayor was out of touch with modern agriculture and manufacturing.
“He just insulted every farmer and every blue collar worker because they don’t have as much ‘gray matter’ as smart people in the info tech biz,” was one response.
“The man has no clue how much information and technology goes into agriculture and skilled trades careers. Humans
flipped from 98% to less than 2% agricultural in a couple of centuries for a reason,” was another response.
For anyone not familiar with today’s farming and manufacturing, the controversy is a “teachable moment,” dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd, from Sauk County said in a Journal Sentinel interview.
Today’s farmers are knowledgeable about world markets as well as areas such as agronomy, climate change and new technologies. Likewise, manufacturing jobs have changed to become much more skilled.
“We have people here in the Midwest working really hard in high-tech areas across the economy. Come visit us in Wisconsin, is what I would say,” said Lloyd, who in 2018 made an unsuccessful bid, as a Democrat, for the U.S. House of Representatives.