Bloomberg Sparks Bipartisan Outrage for Past, Condescending Remarks About Farmers: ‘Ignorant as F*ck’

Reed RichardsonFeb 16th, 2020, 9:07 pm
 

Democratic president candidate Michael Bloomberg drew mockery from both sides of the ideological spectrum after a viral clip of him showed the billionaire media tycoon belittling farming at a 2016 business school talk and contrasting it with the “gray matter” necessary to work in the modern information economy.

Bloomberg’s 2016 comments during a sit-down discussion at Oxford’s Said Business School gained attention after a Twitter account with the handle, Pete Mentes, posted a one-minute snippet of the former New York City mayor — who has never farmed — claiming “I could teach anybody in this room” to be a farmer.

“It’s a process,” he went on to say, referring to the agrarian economy 300 years ago, “you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on to, add water, up comes the corn.” He then said working in the modern information economy is “fundamentally different, because it’s built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets you need to learn are how to think and analyze and that is a whole degree level different, you need to have different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter.”

The full video of Bloomberg’s comments from Nov. 11, 2016 are here (see video below) and the relevant part begins at the 42:00 mark.

Despite Bloomberg’s attempts to couch his comments as being about farming’s past, his clumsy explanation and dismissive tone outraged critics from both the left and the right, who pointed out that modern agriculture is also, in fact, a very demanding, high-tech job that requires intelligence and critical thinking skills to be successful.

Other commenters looked past his comments and instead offered a meta-take on what the resurfacing of this clip said about the prospects of Bloomberg’s candidacy, which has been hit with several damaging and incendiary stories in the past few days.

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