Indemnity politics

THE WORST THING WE READ™

Being Nicholas Kristof Means Never Having to Face Reality 

AS SOON AS Donald Trump's share of the electoral college map grew to more than 270 votes, it was obvious that something was gravely wrong with how millions of Americans understand the reality they live in. The public went out and voted to restore the presidency to an already once-failed president and convicted criminal who ran on a platform of chaos and destruction, and when reporters and pollsters asked them why, they said it was because they didn't believe he meant his platform and they were convinced he could fix problems that didn't really exist. 

Or was it wrong to say that the voters were wrong? Almost as swiftly as the map turned red, and well before any reliable exit-polling data was in hand, the opinion industry jumped up to explain how the results actually reflected the wisdom of the American people. 

"My neighbors, struggling to pay the rent and buying gas $5 at a time, often perceive national Democrats as remote elites more eager to find them pronouns than housing," Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times. Pronouns! Here's a pronoun: who? Who among the Democrats was talking about pronouns in the 2024 election? 

Kristof was ostensibly writing about the situation in rural Oregon, the region where his family runs a winery and cider brewery and from which he tried to launch a campaign for governor in 2022, only to be thwarted by the fact that he "remained registered to vote in New York and retained a New York driver’s license until late 2020," as the Oregon Supreme Court put it. (Covering the case, the Times wrote that Kristof "had argued that he always saw Oregon as home even as his career took him around the world.") But he was really relating the political folk wisdom of another community—the insular, chronically incurious community in which he's spent his professional life.