Will the media carry its snobbery problem into the next Trump era?

At the 92nd Street Y last month, an audience paid actual money to watch the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin record her podcast with Lincoln Project founding member George Conway. Admission was $20 — but can you really put a price on watching two deranged NeverTrumpers cope with the reality of a looming second Trump presidency? 

In a set reminiscent of Inside the Actors Studio, Rubin began waxing poetic about why the media is so “mamsy-pamsey.” 

This is the same woman who went from calling Barack Obama a “boring gasbag” to claiming his “mere presence reminded us of what a dignified, responsible president sounds like.” She has also performed a well-documented back flip on John Bolton that would make your head spin. 

If anyone knows about flip-flopping, it would be Rubin. But sure, Jen. Let’s hear your take on feckless losers having no spine. 

“There are two explanations,” she sermonized. “The one is, they are convinced that if they would just move a little bit to the right, all those MAGA readers out there — now, you’ll notice the contradiction in terms, ‘MAGA readers’ — would pick up the Washington Post, and they would have more readers.” 

In case her audience wasn’t fast enough to keep up with her razor-sharp wit, Rubin repeated her insult for good measure. “What is the logical fallacy here?,” she asked the crowd. “Yes, reader.” 

The crowd giggled as their haughty host declared that, “there’s nothing that the Washington Post could possibly do that would have those people take out a subscription.” Not with that attitude!

Ironically, Rubin highlighted a major reason why papers like her Washington Post are declining at breakneck speed — and it has nothing to do with right-wing literacy: the media has a snobbery problem.

The fact that Rubin’s excuse for the mainstream media’s collapse is to write off half the country as illiterate is almost too on the nose for the tolerant DC elite. 

Like so many of her contemporaries, Rubin has a stunning unwillingness to think beyond her Beltway bubble and would rather look down her nose at anyone who does not share her depressing and narrow worldview. 

On the bright side, Rubin’s condescension is welcomed in her circles. Snobbishness is a feature, not a bug, of the journalism aristocracy. 

Who can forget Don Lemon’s infamous boomer rube panel on CNN in 2020? The host squealed with laughter as his panelists, CNN contributor Wajahat Ali and the forever filmmaker Rick Wilson, mocked Trump supporters. 

In a thick southern accent, Wilson yelled, ”’Donald Trump’s the smart one — and y’all elitists are dumb!’”

Ali got in on the fun and shouted, “You elitists with your geography and your maps — and your spelling!’”

“Your math and your reading!” Wilson added while Lemon wiped tears from his eyes. 

Who says that Democrats don’t have a sense of humor?

Back in 2019, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough chastised Trump’s base saying, “It’s the responsibility of the people that show up at those rallies to not be stupid, to not be so stupid that they should be kept away from blenders.” 

The “too-dumb-for blenders” crowd is also too dumb to understand inflation, according to Joe’s co-worker Joy Reid. In 2022, she told Nicolle Wallace that Americans didn’t know about the concept of inflation until Republicans taught it to them. “Most people who would’ve never used that word ever in their lives are using it now because they’ve been taught it, including on TV, including in newspapers,” she huffed. “They’ve been taught this word.”

Reid also thinks we are stupid enough to believe that her old blog was hacked by a time-traveling homophobe. And if we can’t see through that lie, then why would we understand how grocery prices getting higher? 

It makes sense why these mouthpieces spent the last four years trying to defend a president who called half the country garbage a week before Election Day. After all, there is honor among snobs. 

The sad part is that behind conjuring rape hoaxes or Russian hoaxes, being snobs is one of the few things at which the keyboard warriors truly excel. It comes naturally to them in a way that basic fact-checking does not. For many of these hacks, being pretentious snoots is the only consistent thing about them. Don’t go mamsy-pamsey on us now.