“Woke” politics is killing the Democratic Party. Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, clearly has the best chance of beating Donald Trump, but he’ll never be in a position to do so because of his habit of stating empirical truths. That’s totally disqualifying to the party’s Social Justice Warriors.
There’s plenty to dislike about Bloomberg — principally, his refusal to accept the science on guns and his longing to dump low-wage workers on the country to manicure his golf greens at half the price. (Also, he banned the Big Gulp!)
But those aren’t suicidal positions in the Democratic Party. No, it’s Bloomberg’s grasp of the obvious that appalls the party’s base — as was obvious from the gasps of debate audiences and the media.
The Feminist Division of the Woke Brigade:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been universally praised for hounding Bloomberg during the last two debates, demanding that he “release” former female employees from any nondisclosure agreements made as part of workplace lawsuits.
Assuming Bloomberg even has the authority to “release” parties to a contract, which in many cases he likely doesn’t, this would be a disaster for plaintiffs.
The precise reason defendants are quick to offer handsome settlements in exchange for nondisclosure agreements is to protect their reputations. If such post hoc, one-sided revisions of the agreements were to become commonplace, the offers will come a lot less frequently and they’ll have a lot fewer zeros.
Victims of sexual harassment will be forced either to accept a much smaller settlement, or to waste years of their lives on expensive legal proceedings, which they might lose. Juries are unpredictable.
And as Bloomberg has said, it’s not only the accused who want privacy in these cases. Just ask Harvey Weinstein’s accusers if they enjoyed having their dirty laundry aired at his criminal trial.
But in the name of “Girl Power” feminism, liberals are happy to screw over all future victims of sexual harassment.
The Racial Division of the Woke Brigade:
After slashing the murder rate in New York City to unimaginable lows, the former mayor bluntly explained how it was done: “Put a lot of cops on the streets, put those cops where the crime is, which means minority neighborhoods.”
Logic is patriarchy!
If “95 percent of murders — murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. … male, minorities 16 to 25,” he said, then police should be questioning about 95 percent young male minorities.
Math is patriarchy!
True, Bloomberg was off by a few percentage points: Typically, only about 90 percent of murder suspects in New York City are minorities (as are their victims.) On the other hand, the mayor was under-counting black and Hispanic shootings. About 97 percent of shootings in New York are committed by minorities. That’s precisely what “stop and frisk” stops.
Overwhelmingly, their weapon of choice is a gun. Liberals wail about guns, but how do they imagine police get guns off the street? Answer: They go to high-crime neighborhoods and stop and frisk young men. As Bloomberg explained, “they say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to get caught.’ So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.”
The aggressive policing of former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Bloomberg saved thousands, if not tens of thousands, of black and Hispanic lives. But to “The Woke,” saving such lives is an unforgivable sin if that means a few minutes of humiliation for young men in high-crime neighborhoods.
The Ta-Nehisi Coates Division of the Woke Brigade:
During the 2008 financial crisis, Bloomberg explained how it happened:
“It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone. Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.’ And then Congress got involved, local elected officials as well, and said, ‘Oh, that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit.’ And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans, where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”
Forget everything else he said. The moment Bloomberg mentioned “redlining,” liberal brains froze.
There’s nothing the matter with talking about redlining per se; author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates does it all the time. But the sole purpose must be to blame this FDR-era policy, which was outlawed in 1968, for black poverty today.
Contrary to most news accounts, Bloomberg didn’t blame the end of redlining for the financial crisis. If that were true, it would have been called “the financial crisis of 1968.”
He blamed politicians’ gargantuan overreaction to redlining, decades later, for the financial crisis. That’s what’s known as “an indisputable fact.”
As was reported extensively at the time, every governmental and quasi-government agency having anything to do with housing during the Clinton administration forced banks to jettison standard measures of creditworthiness in order to issue more mortgages to low-income and minority homebuyers specifically to make up for the legacy of redlining.
Because of redlining policies that had ended 30 years earlier, banks were required to ignore credit scores, W-2s, debt-to-income ratios — and, say, the fact that the borrower’s husband was in prison. (True.) The Federal Reserve of Boston directed mortgage lenders to accept unemployment benefits as a source of income. (Also true.) Other housing authorities followed suit.
Fannie Mae then bundled the bad mortgages with the good and sold them to banks, which spread the bundles to investment portfolios throughout the country. When real estate prices tanked, the bad mortgages went belly-up, and the entire financial system collapsed.
Bloomberg knows what caused the 2008 financial crisis. But that is intolerable to the new “woke” Democratic Party.
Ann Coulter is a lawyer, a syndicated columnist and conservative commentator, and the author of 13 New York Times bestsellers. The most recent, “Resistance Is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind,” was published in 2018. Follow her on Twitter @AnnCoulter.